


tender was the flesh at his neck

by honeyvenom



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Barebacking, Bottom Eddie Kaspbrak, Claiming Bites, Comeplay, Daddy Kink, Dark Richie Tozier, Dom/sub, Dubious Consent, Dubious Consent Fantasy, Dubious Morality, Face Slapping, Feminization, Feral Behavior, Homophobic Language, Human Pennywise (IT), Jealous Richie Tozier, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Minor Bill Denbrough/Eddie Kaspbrak, Minor Pennywise/Eddie, Murder, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Obsession, Past Drug Addiction, Possessive Behavior, Power Imbalance, Protective Richie Tozier, Public Sex, Reddie Fairytales (IT), Rough Sex, Size Kink, Sleeping Beauty Elements, Spells & Enchantments, Suicidal Thoughts, Top Richie Tozier, Unhealthy Relationships, Verbal Humiliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:53:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23596384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeyvenom/pseuds/honeyvenom
Summary: It's the night the Losers have been building up to for 27 years: their one chance to finally defeat the demon from their childhood. Except Henry Bowers has broken into the Town House and stolen Eddie away. To the sewers and to Pennywise. Richie, who's struggling with his attraction to Eddie and the reemergence of his dirty little secret, sets out to get him back.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 54
Kudos: 410





	tender was the flesh at his neck

**Author's Note:**

> Please read all my tags before you read this fic. 
> 
> This story is inspired by the original version of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale, so please keep that in mind before you read.
> 
> If you're familiar with my previous fics and the dynamic I like to write between Richie and Eddie, you'll probably know what to expect from this fic. But please still heed the tags and read these notes before you read any further. 
> 
> This fic features a very flawed and selfish version of Richie who struggles with his inner demons, has dark sexual fantasies about Eddie and makes morally dubious decisions. These qualities also inform his relationship with Eddie, as well as how he speaks to him and about him to the Losers. If you don't enjoy a darker interpretation of Richie, this might not be the fic for you.
> 
> As a side note, Richie is written as 18-years-old when he has teenage fantasies about Eddie, who is also 18.
> 
> If you want a spoilery synopsis of the fic before you read any further, please look at my end notes too.

Afterwards, when everything was over and Derry was just a pinprick of blood in his periphery, Richie would think back to the book of fairytales.

It had belonged to Bill's mother first. She had grown up with it, after finding it in one of Derry's musty old antique stores as a little girl and begging her mom to buy it for her. One of her most treasured childhood relics, she had passed it on to Bill when he was a toddler, thinking its tales of brave knights and talking cats would delight him. But Bill, more interested in reenacting the adventures of Saturday morning cartoons, hadn't taken much interest in it. Instead it had been Eddie who became transfixed with the book: he looked at it every time they went over to Bill's house, running his fingers along its spine, eyes as wide as saucers as he drank in its pictures of dusky roses and bloodied daggers.

Bill, the smart boy his teachers would come to hail him as, eventually cottoned on, and gave the book to him.

Once the book was in Eddie's possession, he kept it close, like he once did with his teddy bear and blanket. Richie would often see him in the clubhouse with it spread out on his knees, turning the pages reverently as if he held a sacred text, its gold lettering and ornate illustrations keeping his eyes fixed. No matter how loud the others were being - hooting, hollering, screaming bloody murder - Eddie would sit there quietly and read instead. On lazy weekends like that, he'd been much more invested in the lives of princesses than the activities of his idiotic friends.

 _Would I be the prince, Eds?_ he asked one day as he peered over Eddie's shoulder, munching loudly on a pack of chips.

He'd been reading Sleeping Beauty again, and the page he was resting on had an illustration of Aurora in her bed chamber, sleeping soundly under the enchantment of eternal slumber. In the corner, a handsome head and broad torso were emerging through the window: Aurora's prince, come to bestow a kiss upon her soft, still, cupid's bow mouth and break the spell.

 _No_ , Eddie replied, turning his own pouty mouth up at him. _You'd be the ogre. Stomping into the princess's garden and ruining all her flowers._

 _Oh yeah? Can I ruin your flower, princess?_ Richie said, as Eddie's cheeks blossomed pink.

_You can do me a favour and leave me alone instead._

_As you wish, princess._

But Richie doesn't think of the book. Not yet.

Because right now he's waking up in the Derry town square, with a thumping head and a dull buzzing under his skin. And it isn't 1989 anymore but 2016. Overhead the sky has darkened to a milky lavender. Had he passed out? He can't remember. All he remembers is the way Pennywise had laughed at him after he left the arcade, IT's mouth yawning open to reveal four broken layers of sharp teeth. Can only see the way IT had towered over him with his wreath of crimson balloons, eyes rolling silvery white in their sockets, as IT peered down at his frightened face and shrieked. 

_Don't you think it's time to tell everyone, Richie? Your dirty little secret?_

Richie tastes vomit in his mouth and under that, the dull, coppery taste of blood.

His dirty little secret.

He hadn't thought about that in years. What it meant. What it said about him. The secret that had once twisted through him, knotting around his heart and his throat like vines until it was all he could think about. The years had rubbed the secret down to a faint echo. But the second Eddie had flashed those big brown eyes at him in the Jade of the Orient it had snaked around him again, flashing hot in his belly.

_What would Eddie say if he knew, Richie? What would Eddie think about your sneaky, disgusting, smut-red fantasies? Shall we tell him? Shall we invite him to watch? Maybe we could all have a tea party and act them out? Do you think that would be fun, Richie?_

"Fuck you," Richie says out load as he picks himself up, trying to shake the numb feeling from his limbs. "Clown cunt."

A woman passing by with her young daughter scowls at him, and he winces, lifting an apologetic hand at her. It makes no difference. _Stay away from the madman_ , he hears her say as she eyes the blood on his forehead and takes in the dark stubble across his jawline, hugging her daughter close as they hurry past. He doesn't blame her. Everyone should probably avoid Richie. What was it _The New York Times_ had said about him after his last show? The washed-up comedian who brought furore and financial ruin to everything he touched? Sounds about right.

He shucks the leaves off his jacket, cringing at the feeling in his head. He must have landed hard.

All he wants to do is go back to the Town House and sleep. Or maybe get in his car and drive all the way back to Chicago without stopping, fuelled by coffee and whatever cigarettes he still had left in the dash. Maybe the sniffer of coke he kept for emergencies under the front seat. Use it to forget about all of this: Pennywise, the dead children, the way his dick hardened every time he was in Eddie's vicinity. 

_If I left maybe I could take him with me,_ a smoky little voice says at the back of Richie's head.

"Fat fucking chance," he says back, voice like a rusty chainsaw.

Eddie would rather roll his eyes at Richie than speak to him. Had barely glanced more than once in Richie's direction since their altercation at dinner the night before. Richie had thought it was funny, making fun of Eddie again like he did when they were kids. Eddie obviously hadn't felt the same, not from the way he clammed up every time Richie tried to talk to him, the way he edged away whenever Richie came close.

But what did he expect? For Eddie to run into his arms the second they were reunited? He wasn't that stupid.

Richie makes his way slowly back to the Town House, picking his way across town morosely, fingering the arcade token in his pocket.

He realises every street has a memory tied to it. The kiss of Eddie Kaspbrak. Here was the shop corner he shared an ice cream cone with Eddie, his cheeks flooding red as he watched Eddie's pink tongue peek out and lap wetly at the scoop of strawberry; here was the road where Eddie had told him off for standing up to Bowers, his sweet little face flushed with anger as he called Richie an idiot with a death wish; here was the alley where Eddie had lightly brushed his fingers against Richie's when the others weren't looking, seeking out comfort after patching Ben up.

Every street feels like him, and it makes something inside Richie - something with jowls and teeth - bristle with hunger. 

It's dark by the time he gets back. The Town House is lit up like a birthday cake, and he wonders if all the Losers are back yet. What Eddie's up to. If he's getting undressed, if he's bathing, if he's rubbing his expensive body lotion all over his soft skin...

 _Knock it off,_ he thinks, filing the images away for later, when he's back in his room. He hasn't come for two days, and his balls feel heavy and full. He wonders if he has time to call Kit - the sexy little thing he's been seeing for the past couple of weeks - and talk dirty to him for a bit as he jerks off. But he doubts it. Not with the way Bill's been watching him like a hawk. Like he's about to fly off the handle at any moment.

He cricks his neck, getting ready for the hell storm he'll probably get from Bill for being so late, when it happens.

 _There's something wrong_ , the voice at the back of his head says.

And there is. He can feel it from down the street, emanating from the Town House, forcing its way down his throat like a black ooze.

He knows this feeling, it's something that had hung over him that entire summer with Pennywise. It was something that had pressed up against him as sweetly as a lover, seeping into his skin, the moment Mike had called him the day before. It was the feeling of pure dread.

He half runs down the street to get back.

As soon as he gets in, he finds Losers grouped together in the breakfast room, visibly palpating. Ben has his arm around Bev's shoulders, who's saying something about how they should have heard something from his room. Mike, in his firm voice, says she shouldn't blame herself. Bill stands a little away from them, not talking, his face deep in thought. The only person who isn't there is Eddie.

"Richie, you're back," Bev says when she sees him. She tries to smile but the skin around her eyes looks bruised, which means she's been crying.

Mike also gives him a fake smile, too tight around the edges to be genuine. "Richie-"

"What's happened?" Richie interrupts, his pulse jumping up. "Where's Eddie?"

And maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe Eddie was just in the bathroom, or up in his room taking a rest. There was no reason why anything had to be wrong, even as his skin crawled. As his throat closed up with that feeling of dread, as he struggled not to choke on it. 

The Losers look at each other instead of answering him, making Richie grit his teeth.

"It would be great if one of you could fucking tell me."

"Don't panic, Richie," Ben says, all concerned eyes and softly cupped vowels.

"I won't panic, if you tell me where he is," Richie replies, clenching his hand at his side, trying to focus on the grounding motion of clenching and unclenching it, like his therapist had taught him years before, when he'd swapped therapy and rehab for doing time.

Bill, who'd been staring at the far wall, faces Richie. And Richie's shocked at how haunted his eyes look, how haggard he is. So different to the brave, shining star of a little boy who'd once led them all into the sewers. Where was their noble leader now?

"Bowers was here," he says quietly.

Richie feels himself reel back.

"What? Bowers? _Henry_ Bowers? I thought he was in some loony bin upstate."

"He was here," Bill says, obviously trying to keep his voice even, "he broke in. And he took Eddie."

Nausea grips Richie's stomach. He hasn't eaten all day, had only picked vaguely at a gas station sandwich that morning, but his stomach still pulses. Still threatens to force him to his knees, bringing everything up until he retches emptily onto the floor. 

"Why?" he asks, even though he knows the answer. Even as a cold sweat begins to prickle at his hairline. 

They all stare at him, and Richie can feel the wave of sympathy coming off them. But he doesn't want it. He doesn't want their understanding, or their condescension. What he needs is to find out where Eddie is, right now. Because this wasn't supposed to happen. It hadn't been the plan. 

"He's taken him to Pennywise."

"Oh my god," he says, as he feels himself start to tremble. "Oh my fucking god, no. No, no, no."

 _No, this couldn't be right._ He'd seen Eddie just a few hours ago, he couldn't have been taken. And not by Bowers. It didn't make any sense.

He drags his hands over his face, pulls them through his hair. "Fucking _no_ ," he moans into his palms.

"You need to calm down," he hears Bill say. 

"Don't tell me to fucking calm down," he snaps. "Where the hell were all of you anyway?" He cuts his eyes at Ben and Bev, the cosy new couple. "Let me guess, you were too busy making moon eyes at each other to even notice Henry fucking Bowers had broken in?"

"Hey," Ben says, tightening his arm around Bev's shoulders. "That's uncalled for. You don't have to be so aggressive."

"Maybe I wouldn't be so aggressive if Eddie hadn't just been kidnapped by a lunatic who slit his dad's throat."

"We tried our best, Richie," Bev says, her voice shaking. "We heard something crash upstairs in his room. By the time we got there they were gone."

Richie looks at all of them. Sees how frightened they are.

"Well what are we waiting around for? Bowers obviously hasn't taken Eddie for a fucking picnic. We need to go now."

"We can't just barge in there," Bill says, and the way his voice radiates calm makes Richie want to bite at him. "We need a plan."

"We have a plan. Mike's stupid ritual." Richie gets the totem from his pocket and waves it at them. "Look, I did my homework assignment."

But Mike shakes his head at him solemnly. "The Ritual of Chüd... Richie, it's not going to work. There aren't enough of us to perform it. We were already weak without Stan. Being without Eddie makes us even weaker."

Richie almost spits, almost can't talk through the saliva flooding his mouth. Was he fucking _serious?_

"Fuck your ritual, dude. If we hadn't split up, like I said, because I knew it was a dumb fucking idea, Eddie wouldn't have been taken. Because we would have been here for him. I fucking told you that we needed to look after him. Eddie is-"

But he doesn't need to say it because they all knew. Eddie was the softest of them, the most vulnerable. It was the same when they were children, though he had fought against it tooth and nail, and it was the same now. Soft little man, in his sham marriage, trying so hard to be brave.

"I'm sorry," Mike says, his face etched with regret. "I'm just as worried as you are."

"If that's true, we need to go now. We're wasting time standing here."

"This is what IT wants," Ben says, looking between them. "If we go, we're heading into a trap. IT wants us to be emotional."

"I don't care," Richie says. "You don't know how Bowers was with Eddie, okay? The way he used to look at Eddie, how he was around him."

Because Richie remembers. Remembers Bowers' snake eyes on Eddie whenever he saw him. How he whistled at Eddie when he walked by, his gaze like a hot rash all over Eddie's legs, cooing _hey baby, hey queerboy, hey fag, hungry for some dick?_ The way he stroked his hand down Eddie's arm when he caught him in the woods once, hot breath on Eddie's cheek as he said, _what will you give me if I let you go?_

"I said calm down, you're being a hothead," Bill says, breaking through the memories. "If we barge in like this, you're going to get us killed."

"Fuck you," Richie spits. "You don't give a shit about Eddie anyway."

Bill stares at him, shock leeching all the colour from his face. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"I mean you don't give a shit about him unless he's doing what you want him to do."

And it was true. Eddie had always followed Bill around like he hung the moon. Like he was a hero from one of his fairytales. Bill could do no wrong. Even when he was blindly leading them into a crackhouse on a hot summer's day to get his milky white arm broken.

"Richie, that's not fair," Bev cuts in. "We all love Eddie, you know that."

 _No_ , he almost says. _You don't love him like I do._ And the voice at the back of his head chimes, _No one could ever love him like I do._

Pennywise's words come back to him. _Isn't it time we tell everyone your dirty little secret, Richie?_

Ben notices something pass over his face. "What's wrong? Did something happen this afternoon?"

"Yeah," Richie says. "I saw Pennywise in the town square."

"What did IT say to you?"

"It doesn't matter. The usual shit. What matters is getting Eddie back."

Bev nods, her cheeks pale. "He's right. We need to go tonight."

They all look at each other, and something invisible shimmers between them. An understanding, a bond. Something that had been as strong as steel when they were children, and every now and then still glimmered between them.

"He'll have brought him to his lair," Mike says. "Through the house on Neibolt."

Sorrow deepens Ben's eyes as he says, "IT's using him as bait. He knows we'll come for him."

"It doesn't matter," Richie says. "You can stick around here and make as many plans as you want, mock up some storyboards of how it'll all go down. I don't give a shit. But I'm going. I'm not waiting for you to decide what outfit you're going to wear."

He turns to leave when he hears Bill behind him. "Richie- this could be our last chance to stop IT. We have to do it right."

"Do it right then," Richie says over his shoulder. "But if anything happens to Eddie, I'll never forgive myself." 

He's making his way to the front door when he sees Eddie's backpack in the hallway. He'd obviously dropped it there when he got in. Richie stops to rifle through it, finding antiseptic, bandages and painkillers in its various pockets. In one he even finds an expensive little pot of moisturiser that Richie had only ever seen through the windows of fancy department stores. He smiles at it, doing his best to swallow down a sob. 

He slings the backpack over his shoulder as he walks out. Eddie would want it after Richie had got him back. Then, making sure none of the others could see him, Richie slides the gun from his jacket into one of his side pockets. The one he hadn't told the Losers about. It was a compact little thing, as smooth and shiny as a lucky penny, and he couldn't wait to use it to blow that clown motherfucker's head off.

He's halfway down the street, heading into the gloom, when he hears Bill calling after him.

"Rich, we're coming. We won't let you go alone," he says. Their shining leader, pulling through.

They set out as a group. Across Derry and through the house at Neibolt. The house of horrors that had almost swallowed them whole as children.

Although Richie was wrong if he expected to be anymore prepared because he was 27 years older. Not when he got separated from the others and through a winding labyrinth of dark corridors, was stalked by a gang of porcelain boy dolls that all looked like Eddie. They chase him through the house, a horde of beautiful boys in pastel-blue shorts and delicate cream shirts, crying, _Won't you tell us your dirty little secret, Richie? Big boys shouldn't keep secrets, it's so naughty,_ their hands outstretched in front of them as if begging for a hug.

That’s how Bill and Mike eventually find him, surrounded by dolls in a corner of the house. Each one shrieking his name; a wave of tiny hands scrambling at his jeans. With their help, Richie smashes the dolls into a thousand pieces, turning them to rubble with an axe and his fist. Richie pauses when one doll turns its pretty face up at him - its cheeks freckled, its mouth pouty and pink - and says, “Why are you doing this to me, Richie? I thought you wanted us to be together forever?” It starts to cry, teardrops like struck diamonds spilling down its cheeks.

But Richie only pauses for a second.

"What the hell was that about?" Mike asks afterwards, bent over and heaving for breath, surrounded by shattered porcelain. 

"I don't know," Richie says, though something gnaws at him as he stares at one doll's heavily lashed eye.

By the time they've made their way through the sewers, Richie is terrified. It's the kind of bone-snapping terror he hasn't experienced since he was a kid, when the seven of them had waded through here, all holding hands like a daisy chain. Eddie had been with them then. Stan too.

Something happens the closer they get to Pennywise's lair. The walls around them start to shift, glinting with gold. And in the distance Richie can hear a twinkling melody. The kind of song that would start playing as you opened a music box and watched the tiny ballerina dance.

Eddie had a music box like that once, he remembers. A pretty white thing with painted roses on the lid. It had belonged to his dad apparently, and he'd kept it by his bedside with his book of fairytales and his capsules of pink and orange tablets, all intended for his various ailments. 

_Why would a boy have a music box?_ Bill had asked once, when he saw it in Eddie's room. 

Eddie hadn't answered, had just put the music box out of sight as his ears had gone red.

Richie had made sure to punch Bill on the arm the moment Eddie was out of sight.

 _Ow, what the hell?_ Bill had said to him, rubbing his arm and looking betrayed.

 _Well done, numbnuts,_ Richie had replied. _Why don't you keep your stuttering mouth shut?_

"Was it like this last time?" Ben asks, as he stares at the shimmering veins of light. "I don't remember this."

"No, IT's done something," Mike says, whose memories are still the strongest. "It feels like a glimmer, or a mirage."

"Be careful, we don't know what IT will do," Bill says.

"Oh, shit, really? Just when I was about to perform an Irish jig," Richie mutters from the back of the group.

He's about to crack another joke, the only thing he can do to relieve some of the nerves that are turning his spine to jelly, when he stumbles into Ben, who's suddenly stopped dead in front of him.

"Dude, what the-"

But then he sees them: the line of dolls that cluster at the mouth to the cavern in a protective line. They're the same Eddie dolls from upstairs, and they all stare at the Losers with their huge brown eyes, their pink mouths puckered like they're about to cry.

"Christ, not these fuckers again," Richie says, raising the axe above his head.

But the dolls don't attack them. Instead, they bow to the Losers as if they're esteemed guests, their ruffled white shirts cuffed neatly at the wrists, their dark hair in several perfect coifs. 

"What are they?" Bev asks, curling her hands around Ben's arm.

"Pennywise's new henchmen, haven't you heard?" Richie says. "That cheap fuck's all about doll child labour these days."

They all tense when one of the dolls comes forward. Clasped in its hand is a red rose, and it offers it to the Losers with a small smile. The rose is perfect: a deep purple-red, its petals luscious and soft, dripping with glittering pearls of dew. It looks like it's been plucked from a storybook.

The doll says, "We're so happy you've arrived. To see his magnificence: the profound and portentous Pennywise."

Richie snorts. "Is that what we're calling him now?" He eyes the rose still outstretched in the doll's hand. "Is that going to blow up?"

"Please take it," the doll says, the same eerie smile on its face. "A present, for the Sewer Queen."

All the hair on the back of Richie's arms stands on end. "The what?"

"They've been expecting you," is all the doll says. 

"One move and you're going to be dust, you hear me, you little bitch?" Richie says as he reaches for the rose. "I'm not falling for your shit."

The doll doesn't answer. It smiles sweetly up at him, dark eyes guileless against its freckled face. As soon as the rose has exchanged hands, the sea of dolls part to either side of the tunnel, creating a clear pathway into the lair.

Richie swallows, shoving the rose into his pocket. "Let's go, before they realise we're not on the party list."

"Why do they all look like Eddie?" Ben asks as they tentatively make their way to the mouth of the cavern.

"No fucking clue," Richie says, his skin crawling as he passes the smiling, serene legion.

He approaches the entrance to the lair and what Richie sees next knocks the breath out of him. 

The cavern isn't what he remembers. It isn't the dank, dark place dripping with menace. It's not the tomb that stank like an old carcass, where the shadows had whipped around them like eels. Instead, the entire room had been transformed into a palace of bones. They decorate the walls, shimmering like marble in the light, and line the floor in a thick, snow-white carpet. And Richie realises, with a sickening thud, that they're not animal bones. They're far too small and slender for that. No, they're the bones of children. The children that Pennywise had killed.

"What is this?" Ben asks, voice cast in sickly wonder. "He's changed it into a throne room?"

On a raised platform, hovering a few inches above the ground in the middle of the cavern, is a throne. It's a gorgeous, grotesque thing, carved from gleaming white shards of bone that had been smoothed down until it glimmered like cream. The seat was deep, plush purple. Something like velvet, the colour of spilled blood. And woven among the bones were small white flowers, blooming so prettily even underground.

Baby blooms. Eddie's favourites.

And Richie's hit with it again: that feeling of dread. There was something deeply wrong here. The dolls. The music. The flowers. And the realisation punches him deep in his gut, that this was designed to be all about Eddie.

The blinding light suddenly shutters out, casting the room in gloom. They all jump, instinctively huddling together like they did as children.

"Be careful," Bill says. "IT's around here somewhere."

"Where is that clown fuck?" Richie asks. "What fucking game is he playing?"

They don't have to wait long. A second later they hear a twinkle of bells, like the bells that would chime on a clown's suit, and a high-pitched titter - the same one that had haunted Richie's dreams for 27 years - and from the shadows at the far end of the platform comes Pennywise.

"Children," he says, as his sloped forehead and misshapen body emerge from the darkness. "I'm so happy that you could join me at last."

They all cringe back, the putrid sight and smell of him rooting them to the spot, as the years drip from them like sea foam until they're once again the frightened children that had come running down here on that hot, blood-stained summer. Full of big words and false bravado. 

Richie feels the shudder pass through them, one after the other. They're all terrified.

He finds his voice first. "Where's Eddie?"

Pennywise grins at him with blood-stained teeth, the white powder at his mouth cracking. 

"Such a disappointing welcome, and after so long... What's made you look so glum? Would you like a balloon? Some popcorn? How about a ticket to the Ferris Wheel? Would that cheer you all up, huh?"

"T-t-tell us where he is right now," Bill says, childhood stutter sparking back to life. 

Pennywise's grin looms larger as he looks at Bill, and they cringe as saliva drips from his mouth onto his musty collar.

"Oh Billy Boy, how I missed you the most. Did you miss me?"

"Not a chance in hell," Bill says, though his mouth quivers. 

"Oh I'm sure that's not true. Not with the hole you've been carrying around in your chest all this time. How long did it take you to remember, Billy? How I tore your brother's arm off in the middle of the street and watched him bleed out? How the agony he felt as he died kept me fed for weeks?"

"Shut up," Bill says. "Shut the fuck _up_."

But Pennywise only laughs, tipping his head back to shriek at the ceiling, where the Deadlights pulse. 

"Oh how I've missed you children. My absolute favourite children." His eyes flit over them, and Richie feels his skin break out into painful bumps as a feeling like tiny knives nicks over his skin. Like Pennywise is cutting into them, tasting their blood.

"How time has ravaged you though." He flicks his finger between them. "Bevvie married her mean old daddy, burying her trailer trash origins in pretty clothes; Benjamin lost the weight but never the knowledge that he was just a fat little pig underneath; Billy became a superstar author, exploiting his past for fame and success; Michael stayed in Derry and buried his melancholy in his books and flings with school teachers; Richie sold jokes by the dozen, hiding his true face behind a comedy mask; Stanley preferred to cut open his wrists than ever see you again. Maybe he should have cut open his yellow belly instead. And Eddie... well, you all know what happened to our sweet little Eddie." 

Richie shoots forward, only kept back by Mike's firm grip on his arm.

"Tell us where the fuck Eddie is, you asshole. I swear to god if you've done anything to him-"

Pennywise peers down at him. "Or you'll what? Will you hurt me?"

 _Yes,_ Richie thinks. _I'll rip you to fucking shreds._ Pennywise smiles back, his teeth curved and yellow, like he can hear every thought in Richie's head.

"We want him back, we'll do anything," Mike says, in a voice that would sound calm if it wasn't for the tremor. 

Pennywise lifts a hand to his chest, as if hurt, his face drooping into a melodramatic show of sadness. "I'm offended, Michael. Don't you think I know how to look after my guest? That I haven't shown him anything but the finest courtesies?" 

"Show us then," Richie snaps. "If he's so fine. Bring him out here."

"So impatient. So rude. But if you insist." Pennywise clicks his fingers in the air. "Eddie, darling? Come here."

Richie's chest goes tight, his pulse sky-rocketing. He half-expects Bowers to come out, dragging a struggling, gagged Eddie behind him on the floor like a piece of meat. Or for Eddie to float down from the ceiling like Bev did all those years before. And deep down, he fears - with a churning stomach - that he might be dead already. That Pennywise might present his dead body as delicately as the doll had presented the rose. 

But what he doesn't expect is this. 

The vision that is Eddie Kaspbrak walking from the shadows naked. 

The Losers all gasp in unison, all words lost.

Because this was Eddie - their anxious, shy, highly strung, cloistered, baby Eddie - and he was walking toward them, adorned in nothing but the golden glow from the Deadlights and trinkets made from bones. There were bracelets around both wrists, a tight choker around the thin stem of his neck, and on his head had been placed a pretty tiara of bones, interwoven with the same baby blooms as on the throne.

He was radiant. 

As he comes closer, Richie notices his eyes are different too. Instead of the deep brown eyes that Richie grew up falling in love with - the ones that shone amber in the sunshine and ebbed into the deepest chocolate under the moon - now they were a molten gold. Like the flickering flame of a melting candle. Or the colour at the centre of the Deadlights, pulsing with a deep, burnished glow. 

Richie feels his gut tighten, the bottom of his stomach heating. Even here, seeing Eddie like this, makes something uncoil inside him. 

"Eddie," Bev breathes as he walks into view, so elegantly, across the carpet of bones. 

He ignores her, coming to stand next to Pennywise, who pulls Eddie in close against his side.

"What the fuck have you done with him?" Bill snarls.

"I've given him a home, Billy," Pennywise says, as he strokes a gloved hand down Eddie's side. He rests it on the swell of Eddie's ass, a proprietary touch, and Richie feels the vomit rise in his throat. "It's so lonely down in the sewers. And Eddie here agreed to keep me company."

He turns his head to look at Eddie. "Isn't that right, sweet thing?"

"Yes," Eddie murmurs, his face resting in the crook of Pennywise's shoulder.

They stand there before the Losers, as tightly entwined as two lovers on a mattress. Eddie's golden eyes stare at them blindly, as if he doesn't recognise them, and he leans against Pennywise so sweetly, like the clown was a trusted friend. Not the monster that had once taken him by his broken arm and almost feasted on his face, as Eddie screamed so loudly he tore his throat bloody and couldn't talk for two weeks.

"It must be an enchantment," Mike says. "He's put Eddie's subconscious to sleep."

Pennywise turns his head and wags his finger at him. "Librarian man, you speak so loudly for someone who knows so little."

"Give him back to us," Ben says where he has his arms around Bev, who's sobbing quietly into her hands.

Pennywise smiles at him, his hand coming up around Eddie's waist. "Oh, I truly couldn't. Not after all the trouble I went through getting him here." He half turns to the back of the cavern. "I'd like to thank my dear servant, Henry, for that."

And there he is - Henry Bowers - 27 years older, gibbering to himself at the back of the lair. His hair is matted and stained darkly with what looks like blood, and he rubs his hands over himself as if fighting off a chill. He talks in a harsh whisper, his face ticking. He looks truly mad. 

"What do you want?" Bill asks.

"What do I want?" Pennywise hums, and the sound - like fingers on a chalkboard - makes Richie wince. "What I want is a companion."

Richie sneers at him. "What does that even mean, you sick fuck?"

Pennywise cocks his head at Richie like a dog. He scents the air.

"Oh Richie, so angry, so full of rage. I missed it. Following you everywhere like a cloak. Would you like to know what colour your soul is?"

"I don't give a shit."

"It's a deep, crimson red. The colour of rage, the colour of the most violent passion. Fitting, don't you think?"

"He's just fucking with you, Richie," Bill says. "Don't let him get to you." 

"Do you want to know what Eddie's soul looks like?" Pennywise continues, as he strokes his hand along the skin at Eddie's waist. "I've seen inside him. It's a sad, faded, lonely blue. The colour of baby-blue cotton candy. If I wanted, I'd let it melt on my tongue. Get my hands inside him, rip his body apart. Find where it's nestled between his lungs and feast on it. Would you like that, Richie?"

Richie feels the anger boil over inside him, obliterating every sane thought.

"Stop touching him," he grits, straining against the grip Mike's kept on his arm. "You don't get to fucking touch him."

Pennywise makes a face like he's pretending to cry, the corners of his mouth drooping down.

Tucked against him, Eddie remains as quiet as a church mouse, his face half hidden by Pennywise's collar and shock of orange hair. In a couple of seconds, Richie has his entire body catalogued, feels it burning into his brain. His body is slender and fair, with long, slim legs and a tiny torso. His ass is a high, pert peach, and between his legs he looks small and soft. His hair falls in soft waves, like it had been washed and brushed since he'd been brought to the cavern, and the flowers on his tiara dot his hair like stars. He looked truly exquisite.

And the sight of him, curled up so lovingly to Pennywise, has Richie biting down on his tongue until he feels it bleed.

"What is it, Richie?" Pennywise asks. "Does my visage disturb you? Maybe you'd prefer something a little closer to home?"

What happens next makes Richie's breath catch: Pennywise runs a gloved hand along his face, and his form starts to shift in a heated glimmer. What emerges on the other side is an ugly, old man with a doughy face, his clown suit melting into breeches and a shirt. The circus man. Bob Gray.

"It's him," Bev says, cringing back. "The man in the photos, back at the apartment..."

Eddie doesn't take any notice of the change. All he does is cuddle closer to Pennywise. Like he's a lover. Someone cherished. 

"No good?" Pennywise asks them, his eyes staring in different directions. "What about this then?"

He swipes his hand across his face again, and this time he shifts into something completely different. Before their eyes, he transforms into a young, handsome man, his clothes sharpening and bleeding into a dark, fitted suit. His hair grows into a lustrous crown of brown hair, and his skin burns to a golden tan. But when he smiles, Pennywise's long grin remains. As does the red clown paint that slashes across both pale eyes.

He grins at the Losers as he drags his hand down Eddie's naked back. 

"Does that make you feel better? We make a fetching couple, don't we?"

And Richie wants to spit, _no._ They didn't. It was vile. It was wrong. But they looked beautiful together. Like a painting of Hades and Persephone Richie once saw in New York, when he'd trailed down the museum's empty corridors before closing. The beautiful woman in her white dress had made him stop, peering at the painting to catch her expression. Descending a winding staircase, a ripe pomegranate in her hand, the look on her face had either been elated or disturbed. Richie couldn't tell. But then he'd noticed the dark figure, beckoning her with an outstretched hand.

The painting title had read, _The Bride of Death_ , and Richie, the idiot he was, informed the security guard that it would make a great postcard.

He doesn't feel quite so jovial now.

"How is this possible?" Bev says as she looks up at Eddie and Pennywise.

"He can become whatever he wants, remember?" Mike says. "This is just a party trick."

"A cruel thing to say," Pennywise says. And even his voice sounds different, deeper.

"Eddie wouldn't go near you if you hadn't put a fucking spell on him," Richie spits, wrenching his arm from Mike's grip.

Pennywise tuts. "It's just an enchantment, Richard. Children's magic. He was very easy. All he needed was a little nudge."

"You're a fucking liar."

"Richie, stop," Ben says, his worried eyes fixed on Eddie.

"Vulgar language. Such disobedient children. Besides, you brought this on yourselves. Edward tells me you've been very naughty." Pennywise turns to Eddie, dropping the arm from his waist to take him by the chin. "Tell me what your little friends said, my love. And tell the truth."

Eddie leans into Pennywise's touch and says, "The Ritual of Chüd. They have totems. They're going to use them to destroy you and the Deadlights."

Pennywise makes a shocked noise. "Such braggarts. Such fiends. What should we do to punish them for their hubris, my love?"

"Hang them up. Cut into them. Make them learn their lesson," Eddie murmurs. 

"And what do you say, Eddie?"

With a simpering expression, Eddie looks up into Pennywise's eyes and says, "My love, my Adonis, my king."

"Oh my god," Richie moans. "No."

Pennywise laughs at the pained look on his face. "Isn't that what you children called me? The Sewer King? Well I'm going to make Eddie my queen. I do hope you'll be able to join us for the royal wedding. You, and all the dead children of Derry."

"No," Bev says, horror bleeding into her voice. "You can't."

Pennywise makes a disapproving tut. "Can't. Hmm. I don't like that word, Bevvie."

Bev shrinks back at the nickname. The name her father would call her when he was in one of his violent tempers.

"Come," he says to Eddie, taking him by the hand. He leads him to the throne - the carved, bone-white monstrosity in the centre of the platform - and sits down. Then in an act that has Richie's blood pounding, takes Eddie by the waist and pulls him onto his lap.

"Isn't he gorgeous?" Pennywise says, as he arranges Eddie against him. "The most beautiful doll?"

"Stop touching him," Bill says, his hands clutching at his hair. "Jesus Christ, just stop it."

"I can't stop what is my right, Billy Boy. Don't you understand yet? Eddie is mine to touch. Mine to play with. Mine to use however I please. Because the best of your darling Eddie, Losers, belongs to me."

In desperation, Richie blurts, "Take me instead. Switch us. I'll do whatever you want, just let him go."

"Richie, no," Bev cries out, but it doesn't matter, because Pennywise only regards Richie coolly from the throne.

"Hmm, I don't think so. Not someone as coarse and dirty as you. Not when I have Eddie."

With fingers as long and white as spider's legs, Pennywise runs his hands over Eddie's naked body. He flutters his fingers over the jut of his ribs before lightly thumbing at his nipples. They pebble instantly and Eddie arches back, pressing his body against Pennywise with a small gasp.

"Such a beautiful little thing, isn't he? I wonder what it would be like, to wind him up and break him back down again?"

And Richie can't take it anymore. He feels himself crack, shouting across the cavern, "Just stop it, please. Please stop touching him, I'll do anything."

Pennywise fixes his eyes on Richie, his hands halting. "Anything?"

"Yes, anything."

The smile on Pennywise's face was as cunning as a cat's. "How sweet it tastes, the desperation of a lover," he muses, as he runs his hand down Eddie's leg. Down the bare, naked vulnerability of him. "Because you do love him, don't you, Richie?"

"Yes," Richie says, the confession spilling from him like rain water. "I love him."

He feels the others turn to look at him. But he can tell, from the bond strung between them, that they're not surprised.

"How much do you love him?"

"More than anything."

Pennywise arches an eyebrow. "Then I need you to do one thing."

"Anything, tell me."

"What I need you to do, Richie, is tell everyone your dirty little secret."

Richie's mouth turns sour. That sickening clench in his stomach turns into a fist. 

His dirty little secret?

He thinks of all the dolls upstairs, each one chanting, _your dirty little secret, Richie, tell us your dirty little secret._

He thinks of the hunger that had been rising inside of him ever since he was a boy. The one he'd always seen as vines creeping around his throat and the tender lining of his heart, how it had poisoned his bloodstream, turning his adolescent love for Eddie into something ferocious. 

He thinks of the way he'd looked at Eddie at the restaurant last night. The way the fangs inside him had snapped as he thought, _oh baby, I could break you._ As he imagined all the things he could do to a body as small and sumptuous as his.

He thinks of the others finding out, about the thing he'd kept hidden for all these years, about the secret that grew inside him like a virus.

"Tell them, Richie," Pennywise says in a sing-song voice. "Tell them about your dirty little secret."

Richie shakes his head. "I- I can't."

Pennywise's expression goes deadly. His hand slides up to grip Eddie by the throat.

"If you don't, I'll hurt him. And it'll be the greatest torment he's ever suffered. You thought he hurt when he broke his arm. That will seem like the sweetest pleasure compared to what I'll do to him. And I'll force him to beg me for more as I do."

Richie almost vomits from fear. Is only held back from catapulting himself across the lair by Mike and Bill, who hold him back.

"Don't! Fuck, please don't. I'll do anything you want. Just please don't do anything to him."

"Tell them then."

Richie swallows, his voice faltering.

Pennywise cocks his head, fingers stroking along the pale skin at Eddie's throat like the tip of a knife.

"Tell them or I'll slit his throat and brutalise his body while you watch."

The thought turns Richie to ice, so he submits. Letting the dam inside him crack open and the memories pour in.

There he is. Teenage Richie. Looking at Eddie wherever he went. Following him home from school. Staring at him in class. Drinking in his freckles and dimples every time they hung out. Cycling over at night so he could stare at his window and imagine climbing up the house to get inside. He remembers the afternoon he found him dozing in the clubhouse, how his shorts had ridden up, his tan dissolving into a creamy white on his thighs. He remembers how intensely he'd wanted him in that moment, how he'd almost drooled with how much he ached, as he imagined putting his hands on Eddie's shorts and pulling them down. How he had turned around and run all the way home before he could do it. 

He remembers all the times he had taken a handful of Eddie's hair and _pulled_ to make him look at him. How he had teased him, pinched him, snapped at him with his teeth as Eddie jumped back. And he remembers the day he'd taken a length of rope in his hands and wondered how it would look looped around Eddie's skin. How sweetly he would beg him to be gentle, as Richie tied him up and dragged him into his bed. He remembers the way he had panted, head dizzy, as his dick got so hard he was coming within seconds of getting a hand around it.

"This is what I wanted," he says finally, wrenching the secret from deep inside himself. "I wanted Eddie like this."

He looks at Eddie, sitting so innocently on Pennywise's lap. How soft he looks as he leans against Pennywise's chest, playing with the buttons on his shirt. Thinks of all the fantasies he had about Eddie doing exactly that. Sitting on Richie's lap in the clubhouse or when he played video games, or even in public, walking into a diner and telling Eddie to sit at his feet as he ate. And in the fantasies, Eddie always did what he was told without question, looking at Richie like he was his entire world. Leaning against Richie's leg, letting himself be fed, not even noticing anyone else.

"I didn't want him to have a choice. I wanted him to belong to me. Had these fantasies about stealing him. Where he'd be mine and no one else's."

The others are all silent, watching him with bated breath. He feels their unease bleed into the air around him.

"That's my dirty little secret. My biggest fantasy."

"Tell them again," Pennywise says. "Make them see it."

"I wanted-" he stumbles, "I wanted Eddie to belong to me. Completely. Heart, body. I wanted him to be under my spell."

"Wanted?"

"Want. That's what I want. What I still want."

Shame gnaws through him. He doesn't look at any of the others. Can't. 

On Pennywise's lap, Eddie doesn't make any sign that he's heard Richie's hushed confessions. He continues soothing his hands down Pennywise's chest, like the others aren't even there. 

Pennywise claps slowly, making Richie's cheeks burn.

"Losers... you have a deviant in your midst. You think it's the monster under your bed that you should be frightened of. But the real monster is the one who creeps inside in the form of a friend. You should thank Richie. I plucked this fantasy from his head. Isn't that right?"

Richie nods, staring at his feet. "Yes."

"How love makes fools of us all. But what you don't know is that secrets are infectious."

Pennywise turns to Eddie, who stares at him with glassily. 

"Do you feel like sharing now, sweet pea?"

"Yes. If you want me to."

"Of course I do, I don't want you missing out on this special edition of Show and Tell," he says, easing Eddie off his lap.

Eddie walks toward the Losers, like a performer on stage. He moves with an ease and a confidence Richie's never seen in him before. And he can't help but run his eyes over Eddie again. How small he is. How finely boned. Like every inch of his body had been moulded from white wax.

"I've loosened his mouth," Pennywise says, crooking his legs over the arm of the throne. "I looked inside him and saw all the secrets he kept buried inside. I'm surprised he could even walk with how much they weighed him down. But now he can be free of them." He looks at Eddie. "Speak now."

So Eddie does. Facing the Losers with his golden eyes, he says, "All my life, all I've ever wanted was a man to take care of me. I dreamed about him for years. A big, strong, dark-haired man. Wanted him to take me and wrap me in his arms." Eddie wraps his arms around himself, runs them slowly across his body like a lover might. "Every night I closed my eyes, and all I could see was him. Kissing me. Fucking me. Using me."

Richie feels like he's been punched in the stomach. Beside him, shock makes Bill and Mike loosen their hold on him.

"Sometimes I wanted bad things," Eddie continues. "When Myra was out I'd watch videos. I'd read about men who could come and give me what I needed. I thought about calling a man over, who could come in and use me any way he wanted, right there in my living room. He wouldn't even care what I asked for, he'd just come in and make me his. Maybe he wouldn't even let me come. Just fuck me on the floor and leave me there."

Pennywise's brows rise as he listens to Eddie. "Goodness gracious. It really is the shy ones, isn't it?"

"You're _sick_ ," Bill says. "Stop making him say this."

But Pennywise rolls his eyes. "I'm not _making_ him, Billy. I'm empowering him. Without me, Eddie would never be true to himself. He married his fat cow of a wife to run away from the things he wanted most. And what a tragedy that is. A play with three devastating acts. And this is the final one."

He looks at Eddie again. "Tell them more, my love, make them see the oceans you keep inside."

Pennywise clicks his fingers, and like a button has been pressed, Eddie says, "Bill was my first love. I fell in love with him when I was 8-years-old. I had dreams where he'd fall in love with me and we'd run away together. That I was the one he wanted and not Beverly."

Richie had always known that was true, but the admission still makes him sting. Next to him, Bill shifts.

"Oh Eddie..." Bev says, fresh tears welling up in her eyes.

Pennywise clicks his fingers again. And Eddie says, "I used to think my mom wanted to kill me. Maybe she would have if she could."

Richie thinks of all the times Eddie had been frightened to go home. How he had hung around the clubhouse for as long as possible before he was forced to go back. He'd always seemed a little frightened of Sonia, even after she'd admitted to the placebos. 

He clicks again. "I knew I was gay when I saw a man in town when I was seven-years-old. I went home and dreamed about him holding me."

He feels them all inhale. They had all known Eddie was gay. They had never said anything, or ever discussed it, but it was obvious. Eddie had never been interested in girls. The idea of dating or even being alone with a girl had terrified him. And even though he had clung to Bev, it was only because she had been like a big sister. It's why they had all shared a look when Eddie had said he was married. They all knew.

Pennywise clicks. "I thought I was a freak. That I was useless and weak. I couldn't do anything to help my friends. What good was I to anyone? Sometimes I'd walk home from school and I'd fantasise about throwing myself off the Derry Bridge."

 _Oh baby,_ Richie thinks, _oh Eddie._ How could he not know that he was the strongest one of all of them.

Click. "When I met Richie, I hated him. I didn't know how anyone could be that annoying. That insufferably bad. I-"

"Stop this," Richie says, closing his eyes. "Please, please stop."

"But it's so much fun!" Pennywise crows. "I could make him dance for you if you like. I could do anything."

Richie's eyes shoot open. "No!"

"That's a fantasy of Richie's too," Pennywise says in a stage whisper. "Why don't we list them all out, Richie? Believe me, children. They're so vivid you'll be quivering. I've seen each and every one of them, and the things Richie wants would set this entire town alight."

Richie glowers, thinking of the gun in his bag. But would he be able to get to it without Pennywise hurting Eddie?

"And what do _you_ want?" Bev asks. "Eddie never did anything to you. Let him go and we'll do whatever you want."

Pennywise smiles, lounging sideways on the throne like a long, slinky cat. He leaves them like that for a moment, frayed with nerves, until he finally sits up, and with a lazy stretch lopes over to where Eddie's standing. He stands behind him, running his hands from Eddie's shoulders to elbows. 

"Haven't you been listening? I said I wanted a companion. That's all Eddie has ever wanted too. We're a perfect match."

Richie feels the anger sparking inside him again. "You'll never be a perfect match. Eddie's beautiful. He's kind and pure. You're a fucking disgusting pest that crawled out the dirt."

Pennywise blinks his pale eyes at him. "Speak to me like that again and I'll crush his arm until the bone splinters out of his skin."

Richie's mouth snaps shut, every part of his body shocking with terror. 

Pennywise looks thoughtfully at the Losers for a moment, before his smile turns cunning.

"Though maybe I'll do that anyway. I would love to break his bones, in revenge for what you did to me. An eye for an eye sounds delicious."

Richie moans, "no, please," straining so hard against Mike and Bill that they stumble. 

Pennywise ignores his begging, pressing a finger to his lips. "However... I've had time to think. So many years down here, alone, wondering what I'd do if I ever saw you again. And what I'd really love, children, is to play a game with you."

"A game?" Ben asks, voice tentative. 

"Yes! Some entertainment would be a lovely refreshment. You always were such fun-loving children. Before the woes of adulthood sucked you dry."

Pennywise strokes a finger down Eddie's cheek, leaning in to whisper in his ear. "You like games, don't you, my love?"

"Yes," Eddie says obediently. 

"Fantastic," Pennywise says. Then, locking eyes with Richie, licks a trail up Eddie's ear with his long, glistening tongue.

Richie gags, whining low in his throat like a dog. 

Pennywise looks triumphant.

"But first of all, a pop quiz for the class!" He walks around Eddie to the edge of the platform, looking down at them in his dark suit. "Bill, what was the item you gifted to Eddie as a child? The one thing he held as dear as a kitten. That he brought everywhere with him."

"The book of fairytales," Bill says after a pause.

"And what tale did he read more than any other?"

"Sleeping Beauty," Richie says. He remembers. Eddie had loved that story more than any of the others. He never knew why.

But he couldn't think about that now. Because there was something going on here. Something Pennywise had been leading up to this entire time.

Pennywise makes a sound like a carnival game. "Ding ding ding! 10 points for you! Eddie read Sleeping Beauty every night. Turning the pages in his bed when his mother had gone to sleep, hoping that one day his own prince would come for him, to rescue him from his dreadful life. And now I'm here to make his wish come true. To finally let him be the princess from his book like he always dreamed."

Every inch of Richie prickles in alarm. "What does that mean?"

He looks at Eddie, who's staring at something over the Losers' heads, looking fey and faraway. 

"Eddie? Eddie, look at me. Can you hear me? Eddie! _Look at me_."

Eddie frowns, and Richie's entire body lurches as Eddie locks eyes with him, his brows drawing into a panicked frown.

"Richie?" he says, his voice losing its drugged sheen. "Where am I? I don't know where I am, everything's dark."

"Baby, I'm going to get you out of here, okay? Just hold on for me-"

Pennywise clicks his fingers, and a ripple passes over Eddie's body. His body goes limp again, his face and eyes relaxing once more.

"Keep your eyes on me, Edward," Pennywise says, and Eddie does, ignoring Richie when he cries out again.

"Naughty," Pennywise tsks at Richie. "Especially when Eddie and I were about to have such a tender moment."

He stalks back to Eddie, using a long arm to tug him forward. Eddie instantly moulds himself to Pennywise, drawing his arms around his shoulders.

"I want you to kiss me, my love. Would you like that, a kiss?"

"I've always wanted one," Eddie replies in a breathy sigh.

Richie's entire vision goes blood red.

"Don't you fucking _touch him,"_ he yells. He turns to the others. "We need to do something, we can't let him-"

But the others are silent, eyes wide and white, and Richie turns back to see Pennywise leaning in for his kiss. And Eddie - their sweet, pure, enchanted Eddie - lets it happen. Lets his mouth loll open as Pennywise ravages him, piercing his mouth with his long, wet, dripping tongue.

Richie feels the bottom drop out of his stomach. To his side, Ben is retching, his hands on his knees, as the others stare in horror.

When Pennywise is finished - after he's crushed Eddie to him, and savaged his mouth, Eddie's arms around his neck, his thigh slowly inching up Pennywise's hip - Pennywise pulls away, their lips parting with a slick popping sound that makes Richie want to tear his fucking hair out.

"You bastard," Richie chokes, "I'm going to kill you, do you hear me? I'm going to fucking tear you apart." 

"Not until the main event," Pennywise says. He turns his head to look at Richie. "Tell the class what happened in the Sleeping Beauty story."

"Who the fuck cares?" he says, feeling the chill creep up his spine.

"Tell them or you know what I'll do."

"Aurora pricks her finger on the poisoned spindle of a spinning wheel and she's cursed to sleep for 100 years. Happy now?"

"Very. Unfortunately, we don't have a spinning wheel because my faithful servant-" Pennywise cuts a look at Bowers, who's still gibbering to himself at the back of the cavern, "didn't pick one up for me. But no matter. I'm extremely gifted at improvisation."

"Wait, what are you doing?" Bill says, but it's too late.

Pennywise opens his mouth wide, where one canine is growing, sharpening, like the fang of a saber-toothed tiger. He takes Eddie's fingertip, and in an act that has the Losers yowling across the cavern, grazes it against the edge of the tooth.

Eddie gasps, the blood welling up on his fingertip. A second later, he's swooning, falling into a slow, dead faint into Pennywise's open arms.

The Losers cry out, like the simultaneous howling of a wolf pack, filling the lair with their animalistic warbling of grief. Because Eddie, lying limp in Pennywise's arms, looked dead. Richie is the only one who's silent, feeling every space in his body flood with a dark red, ruinous rage.

Eddie couldn't be dead. Not now. Not when he hadn't had a chance to tell him everything. He _couldn't_.

Pennywise stares down at them, a small smile on his face.

"Eddie's favourite fairytale was Sleeping Beauty. Now his destiny matches hers. I've put him into an eternal slumber, Losers. He'll sleep forever. Never waking. Never growing old. And none of your man-made medicine can do anything about it."

Richie feels his heart beating out of his skin. "You evil fuck. I'm going to fucking kill you. Do you hear me? I'm going to _kill_ you-"

Pennywise raises a finger, silencing him.

"The question is, children, which one of you has the fortitude to claim him? There's still a chance."

"What do you mean?" Ben asks wetly, though the flood of tears.

"I mean, Benjamin, that I want to play a game. You have the chance to save him, if you believe it."

"How?" Bill asks, desperation making his voice hoarse.

"In retellings of the Sleeping Beauty myth, it was true love's kiss that broke the spell. But which one of you will it be?"

"But that's not what happens in the original fairytale," Ben says slowly. "In the original, the prince-" he stops, something dawning on his face.

Pennywise raises an eyebrow. "Caught up, have you? Good." He looks between them. "So who will it be? Will it be the hypnotised, dangerous lover; the childhood prince; the noble lion; the beloved sister; the wise librarian; maybe it could be our friend Henry Bowers."

Balancing Eddie in one arm, he plucks an hourglass from his pocket. An ornate glass figure filled with red sand. He flips it.

"You have one hour," he tells them. "If he hasn't been claimed by one of you by then, he belongs to me. Body and soul. Forever. He'll stay here with me, my eternal companion. And if I die, as you spoiled children have been plotting this entire time, then he'll never wake up. He'll never die. He'll never age. He'll sleep, and you'll never enjoy the smile or laugh of your beloved Eddie ever again."

He stares down at their horrified faces. "Now tell me, which one of you will claim him?"

But Richie's had enough. And Bill and Mike aren't holding him back any longer.

"Fuck you," he says, reaching into the backpack on his shoulder.

Bev sees the gun in his hand. She screams, "Richie, no-"

Richie pulls the trigger: Pennywise has time to blink once in surprise before the bullet sluices through his skull, splitting his head in two like a ripe watermelon. Blood and brains splatter everywhere as he staggers backwards, a bone-rattling shriek filling the cavern. 

He drops Eddie, who falls to the floor, as white and as dead as a fallen angel.

Richie shakes, his finger trembling on the trigger. Adrenaline shocks through him, lighting up every nerve ending in his body. 

Mike looks at him with wide, terrified eyes. "Richie, what have you done?"

"I'm saving Eddie," he says, his finger shaking on the trigger. "We have to get him and get out of here right now."

"But the Ritual of Chüd, we need to-"

"Fuck your ritual, man. I'm getting Eddie and I'm leaving. He-"

His stomach rolls when he hears Pennywise's laugh. _Oh god no_ , he thinks, as Pennywise sits up, the top of his head a red, gaping wound.

"Is that what you think, children?" he asks, his mouth dripping blood. "Is that what you think can stop me? The eater of worlds?"

He smiles at them with a row of splintered shark's teeth, and Richie watches, feeling his sanity come undone when a spider leg emerges from his mouth. One that was furred and dark, a monstrous size. It's followed by three more, skittering from the bloodied stump of his face. 

"He's transforming," Bill shouts. "We need to-"

The chamber implodes.

With a shriek from Pennywise, the walls of bone shatter, shards flying everything. And in a heated pulse from the Deadlights, the platform falls, crashing into a wave of rubble on the floor of the lair. The ripple hits Richie, sends him flying across the room where he hits his head hard.

He has time to think, _Eddie,_ before he blacks out. The last thing he sees is a giant spider emerging from Pennywise's corpse. 

He's not sure how long he's passed out - but he wakes up to screams and darkness. When he gains focus, he sees the Losers scattered across the lair, and a monstrous spider filling the cavern with a million legs, like the long, serpentine necks of a Hydra. 

Eddie lies on his side in the middle of the cavern, shimmering white under the glare of the Deadlights. 

Richie's heart trips - he can get to him if he runs, he can get him and find his way out of here. But that's when Bowers emerges from the shadows, bending down to trace a finger along Eddie's cheek. As he bends down to whisper something in Eddie's ear. Richie can almost hear it, the echo of the things he used to say to Eddie as a child - _hey_ _queerboy_ , with his mocking grin _-_ and Richie's blood heats.

He's running across the lair before he's even thought about what he's going to do. He weaves through the spider's legs, past Mike who's stabbing one leg with a knife, the cut spluttering a yellow, acrid pus; and past Bev, who's pressing her hand to a cut on Ben's cheek. 

He gets to them just as Bowers is drawing his hands down Eddie's chest. Like a child unwrapping a gift at Christmas.

"Hey Bowers," he says. "Get your fucking hands off him."

Richie breaks his nose with one hard punch. And when Bowers falls back, gasping wetly next to Eddie's sleeping form as his ruined nose gushes blood, Richie takes him by the collar and breaks his jaw with another. It breaks with a solid, satisfying crack. 

Richie turns back to Eddie, dropping to his knees as he wipes his bloodied knuckles against his shirt. 

"Eddie?" he whispers, stroking a hand down his cheek. He's still warm. At his neck, his pulse point still beats.

He thinks about what Pennywise said. _You have one hour._ How much time had passed now?

"I'm going to get you out of here, sweetheart," he says to Eddie, as he eases his arms under his back and legs. "Just hang on for me. Just hang on."

Richie picks Eddie up - marvelling at how light he is - and without thinking, he starts to run. 

He runs from the lair with Eddie in his arms. And he doesn't look back: not when he hears Pennywise roar through the cavern, not as Bev screams after him, her throat thick with blood, not even when the fear bolts through him, as he realises he could be leaving the others behind to die.

The porcelain dolls meet him at the lip of the cavern, blocking his way.

"What will you do with him?" one asks. "You are not the king of him."

Richie smashes its face in with his foot, relishing the way it shatters into a handful of shiny pieces.

"Get the fuck out of my way if you don't want to end up like him," he tells the others.

Miraculously, they do, parting for him, as he runs through the cleared passage.

"Take the southern passage," a doll calls after him. "Only then will you have time to claim him before the sun rises."

Richie, for the first time in his life, takes the advice. A hidden passage takes him to the heart of the sewers, where he runs as fast as he can, toward the smell of clean air and the promise of the night sky. The sewer water is filthy, and Eddie's feet and hands drag through it. He'd be livid if he knew he'd been dragged naked through grey water, and Richie can only whisper, "I'm sorry, baby, I'll get you out soon."

But Eddie's head hangs limply over Richie's arm, his body as pale and lifeless as a corpse.

Through the winding passages of rock and water, after what feels like hours, Richie finally finds his way to the opening of the sewers. When he does, splashing into the lake, he cries out, the relief almost bringing him to his knees. But the sky is lightening to a pink-tinged dawn.

At the edge of the woods, Richie lays Eddie's body down as gently as he can. 

He looks so peaceful in sleep, with his worried little frown and every anxiety line smoothed out. He looks so young, so achingly innocent. 

"Eddie? Sweetheart, can you hear me?" he asks, drawing a hand down Eddie's face. 

His face still feels warm, but there's a pale tinge to his skin, and his lips - the ones that brought Richie to his knees - have started turning blue.

He thinks of what Pennywise said - the spell could only be broken by true love's kiss - and he knows what he has to do. There was no one who loved Eddie like he did. He was the only one out of all of them who had the power to break the spell.

Though his heart still pounds like crazy as his leans over Eddie. He'd dreamed about this moment thousands of times growing up. Thinking about Eddie's strawberry-pink lips in classrooms, in the clubhouse, when he was alone in his room. Had spent hours wondering how they would taste, how he would moan, what colour they would bloom after Richie had bitten down hard on Eddie's bottom lip. 

He leans in close, taking in all of Eddie's beautiful little details. His freckles, now so dark against his pale face. The slope of his nose. The dark fan of lashes against his cheek. The pale pink of his mouth. And feels the love swell inside him like a tide.

"I love you, Eddie," he whispers, before he leans in to press the gentlest of kisses on his lips.

He pours all of his love into the kiss - every look he shared with the other man, every thought he'd had of them, every moment he cherished from their childhood - and his head beats with the following prayer: _I love you, Eddie. I love you. I love you._

But Eddie doesn't wake up. His eyelids don't open and his lips stay closed.

"Eddie?" he whispers against his lips. "Baby? Wake up now."

Richie kisses him again. And again. He kisses him so hard his lips hurt. But Eddie doesn't stir.

"Sweetheart? Eddie? You need to wake up, we need to get out of here, we need to-" his words break off on a moan.

Richie takes him by the shoulders and shakes him, but Eddie just hangs limply in his grasp. The choker is still around Eddie's neck, taunting him with its macabre elegance, and Richie grabs it. In one fierce pull, it shatters in his grasp, small bones flying everywhere.

He does the same with the trinkets around his wrists and ankles, breaking them until Eddie is free of all of Pennywise's ornaments. 

"Eddie? Eddie you have to wake up now, do you hear me?" He shakes him harder by the shoulders, almost shouting, until Eddie's flopping like a rag doll in his hands. "You need to do it now, you have to _fucking_ wake up now! We're running out of time!"

Desperation claws at him, makes him draw back his hand and backhand Eddie across his perfect cheek. 

The slap snaps Eddie's face to the side, makes it hang limply against his shoulder. But he still doesn't stir.

And the sky above them continues to lighten.

Richie moans, making a sound like a wounded animal. He clenches his eyes shut, pressing his hands to them as they prickle with tears. 

This couldn't be right - he loved Eddie more than he'd ever loved anyone. How could he not wake up?

"Baby," he says, as he leans in for another kiss, one wet with his tears. "You can't leave me okay? Not now, not when I haven't told you everything." His voice chokes on a sob, and he draws Eddie against him to kiss his face, his neck, every patch of skin he can reach. "I'll do anything if you wake up. Anything. I'll leave you alone if that's what you want, you'll never have to see me again. I'll get out of here the second you wake up and you can be fucking free of me forever. But I need you to wake up, I need you just to do this one thing, Eddie. Please wake up, _please_."

As he turns his face away to cry, two things hit Richie at once.

Pennywise, looking down at them in the sewers saying, _Which one of you will claim him?_

And a memory, out of nowhere. Of Eddie in the clubhouse, the book of fairytales spread out over his knees. 

_"Richie, do you remember Sleeping Beauty? The Disney movie?"_

_"Yeah," Richie had said, as he fingered a cut on his knee. "The movie for chicks?"_

_"It is NOT for chicks. And that's not the point! You know the bit where Aurora's prince wakes her up? With true love's kiss?"_

_Richie had looked at him, not knowing where this was heading. "Yeah..."_

_"Well in the book it's different, Rich. It's so messed up. The prince doesn't wake her up with a kiss. He sneaks in and he... he fucks her, Richie!"_

_He had sounded scandalised, making Richie laugh. "Finally, some content I can get on board with."_

_"But don't you think that's wrong. I mean... why would he do that?"_

_And Richie had shrugged. "I don't know, Eds. Maybe that was the only thing strong enough to break the spell. He had to make her his."_

_Eddie had blinked at him. "Maybe," he said, and he blushed as he looked away, busying himself again with the book._

Richie blinks out of the memory, breathing hard. Is that what Pennywise had meant? 

And he knows he should shrink back - he couldn't do something like that to Eddie, he couldn't degrade him like that. 

But the sky is turning lighter every minute and he won't let Eddie die. 

Richie grabs the backpack at his side and tips it upside down. Somehow in the bundle of band-aids and antiseptic, he finds the pot of moisturiser, and he opens it with frantic fingers, his fingers slipping on the lid more than once. Once it's open, he slicks his fingers with it, getting them wet.

Between Eddie's legs, he pushes his jeans down his thighs and jerks himself to hardness. It's not difficult. Not with the way Eddie looks. How lovely he is spread out like this, his skin glowing in the milky pink twilight, so beautiful and delicate under the shadows cast by the trees.

He swallows as he pushes his fingers inside Eddie. As he stretches him out as much as he can, trying to ignore how the hot clutch of Eddie's body sucks his fingers in. The next moment, Richie's slicking up his cock, and he's biting down a moan as he pushes in. Eddie is warm on the inside, and even without any resistance, his body is agonisingly tight around his dick. _His virgin body_ , the voice at the back of his head whispers.

It's too dry, and Richie catches more than once, but it feels good too. And he can't help but moan as he gets deeper with each thrust. Can't ignore how hard he is, as he ruts between Eddie's thighs, all the fantasies he's ever had about Eddie sparking in his head at the same time.

"God, you feel so fucking good, baby," he husks.

He gets one of Eddie's thighs in his hands and pushes it up. The angle opens him up more, and Richie grunts as he slides in even deeper.

"Yeah, sweetheart, just like that," he says, getting his hand under Eddie to palm his ass, the juiciness of it making his dick jump.

As he fucks Eddie, everything else melts away: the woods, the lake, the smell of the sewers on his clothes. And Richie pants as he twists his hips, getting every inch of his dick inside Eddie. Before he can stop it, the gentle pace turns savage. Richie fucks Eddie hard into the ground, so hard Eddie slides on the grass, and he whines as he shoves his face into the crook of Eddie's shoulder, breathing him in.

Eddie looks gorgeous under him, even as he sleeps, and deep down Richie can't help but relish, in this moment, that Eddie was _his_.

"I love you, Eddie," he pants. "I fucking love you. Always did. Always will. You cannot fucking leave me."

He looks at the pale arch of his throat, of the way Pennywise had slid his fingers over his skin.

He doesn't think. Thoughts aren't possible. Not between the thick line of his cock battering inside Eddie - his beautiful boy - and the way his teeth itch in his mouth as he stares at Eddie's creamy throat. A second later he's surging forward and catching Eddie's skin between his teeth. He's biting down and he thinks with everything that he is, every vein, every blood cell, every thought in his head, _mine, you're mine._

The second Richie's teeth catch in his neck, as the sun crests over the lake, the spell breaks.

A flush of warmth rolls through Eddie's body, and his eyes flutter open as if from a deep sleep.

Richie stills and he looks at Eddie's eyes. They're not dead or dull - or molten gold - but a deep, beautiful brown. 

"Oh my god, Eddie," he gasps, staring down into his eyes. "You're okay."

Eddie looks confused for a second, opens his mouth like he's about to speak, but then he blinks, shifting as he feels Richie's hard dick inside him, and in a moment that Richie had only ever dreamed about, his mouth falls open and he moans.

That's what does it. Eddie moans, brokenly, and Richie comes. He comes hard, with a low, long moan, and he spills into Eddie's open body where he's tucked up so snugly inside him. As he does, he can't help but hike Eddie's hips up with one hand to get all of his come inside. 

God, and it feels fucking amazing. Better than it ever had with Kit, better than any man Richie had ever fucked over the last 20 years. And he knows it shouldn't but it does. Here, with Eddie, nestled between his legs, on the edge of the forest. It's the best thing he's ever felt.

He groans as Eddie clenches around him, deliciously milking every last drop of come from him. It's crackling. It's mind-numbing. It's an orgasm that builds and builds, and obliterates every part of him, filling him with the brightest, most blinding light.

He pants as his orgasm finally starts to fade, blinking down at Eddie's shocked face.

"Richie," Eddie tries again, licking at his lips, where they're chapped, "what's going on?"

"It's okay, I got you out of there."

The tears hit Richie out of nowhere. Seeing Eddie, with his eyes open, beautiful, and alive, is what does it. He cries, and Eddie blinks up at him as his teardrops hit his face. They spill down Eddie's cheeks like they're his own. 

"Richie..." Eddie's hands come up to his waist, stroking soothingly. He seems to remember suddenly that Richie's inside him, clenching around Richie, making him groan again. Eddie's face flushes red, and his eyes go wide and shocked. Doll's eyes.

"Why are we- why are you...?"

"I'll explain everything, I promise."

"I was so lost, Richie, I couldn't find my way out. Everything was dark and I couldn't get out."

"I found you, baby, it's okay."

Richie smoothes his hand down Eddie's cheek, now warm and pink and pumping with blood. He leans down for a kiss, wanting so much to feel Eddie's lips on his and to feel him kiss back, when Eddie's eyes slip to something over Richie's shoulder. He gasps, high and shocked.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he hears Bill say. "Get the fuck out of him now."

Richie freezes and looks over his shoulder.

The Losers are standing at the edge of the lake looking at them, clothes bloodied and torn, faces a portrait of shock. Bev has her hand over her mouth, leaning against Ben, who stares at Richie with wounded eyes. Mike looks resigned and weary, 10 years older than he did the night before. But it's Bill who palpitates with rage, rushing in to grab the back of Richie's shirt.

"Did you hear what I said? Get out of him right now."

Eddie makes a mewling sound when Richie pulls out, his back arching as Richie stumbles up, hurriedly tucking himself back into his jeans.

He looks up when he hears the Losers' collective inhale, and realises Eddie's body is fully on display, so soft and naked against the grass.

In the sharp morning light, Eddie looks like a painting. His hair is mussed wildly, face pale apart from the dark pink imprint of Richie's hand on his left cheek. He's leaning up on his elbows, looking at them, and his eyes are huge and glimmering, so big in his frightened face. On his neck, the shape of Richie's teeth has left a lurid, startling mark that adorns his throat like a ruby-red broach. His legs hang open, thighs parted as if waiting for Richie to slide back between them, and Richie's eyes flick down to the thick line of come dripping down the inside of his leg.

Fuck. Desire makes his stomach tight - _a second go?_ the little voice at the back of his head says. _He'd be so open and wet for you, you could slide right in_ , _show the others who he belongs to_ , it teases, before he tells it in a much louder and colder voice to shut the fuck up.

Bill sees it too. Richie knows from the way his shoulders draw tight as he looks at Eddie. The way he stiffens; his sharp inhale.

He turns on Richie, snarling. "What the fuck did you do to him?"

"I saved him," is all he says. "I broke the spell."

Bill's lips draw back from his gums in a snarl. "Is that what you call it? You think you're his fucking Prince Charming?"

Richie tries to shake his head, something cold creeping up his throat. 

_Now they all know, Richie, they all know your dirty little secret._

The others are all looking at him with expressions he's never seen on them before. Even Bev looks like she doesn't recognise him, something indecipherable crossing over her face. Like Richie is something monstrous. Something unknown. 

Bill's so angry he's trembling. "You asshole," he manages to spit out. "How could you?"

The words come out of Richie's mouth before he can stop them. "What is it? Just pissed you didn't get to him first?"

Bill's fist smashes into the side of his face.

The force of it makes Richie stagger back a few steps, feeling the blood well up at the corner of his mouth. He hasn't been punched in more than two years, not since the last bar brawl that put him in rehab to side-step prison time. It makes his mouth blot numb then fire up in agony.

Bill comes toward him again, his face wild. He looks like he's going to keep hitting him and not stop until Richie's face is a concrete of red.

But Richie is bigger than he once was. Bigger and stronger. He isn't the little boy who could hardly swing a punch outside of Neibolt. He had three inches on Bill now, and he'd been in more than enough fights to know how to hurt someone where it counted. 

He spits the blood from his mouth in an arched stream, his own fists clenching at his sides, when they hear a whining noise. They both look down to see Eddie, who's flung out a hand to grab Bill's ankle, looking up at them desperately. 

"Bill, don't! Please don't hurt him, don't."

"Eddie," Bill says, his entire body rocking with adrenaline, "I can't let him get away with this."

But Eddie shakes his head, tightening his hold on Bill's foot. "He saved me. Please don't hurt him."

They all stand there for a moment: the six of them silhouetted against the dawn, plastered in grime and blood, strangers to one another. 

It's Mike who moves first, approaching Eddie slowly like he would a soft, spooked woodland animal. Mike, who'd always treated Eddie like a little brother. Kneeling by Eddie's side, he strips out of his jacket and wraps it around him.

"Come on, sweetheart," he murmurs, "let's get you back." He picks Eddie up like he weighs nothing. Like he's nothing more than a feather. "I'll bring him back to the library, get him cleaned up," he says to the rest of them, cradling Eddie close to his chest.

Richie feels a surge of panic - he can't leave, not without him - but Mike gives him a look. "I don't think that's a good idea," he says.

"But-"

"No buts, okay? Eddie's been through a lot." 

"We'll come too," Bev says, her hair so streaked in dirt it looks black. "We'll help bring him back."

Mike nods, checking the sky. "It's just turned dawn. We should hopefully get back without anyone seeing us." His face turns introspective. "And I need to check some of my books. Make sure there aren't any side effects from the spell."

Eddie looks up at him in panic. "Spell? What happened?"

"We'll explain everything," Mike says in a soothing voice. "Don't worry yourself now."

"And Pennywise, what happened? Is IT-"

"I said we'll explain," Mike says, in a slightly firmer voice. "Right now we have to get you patched up, okay?"

Eddie nods, but he looks frightened. He looks over at Richie with wide, panicked eyes. 

"Richie," he says, reaching out for him, but Mike steps back, keeping him out of Richie's space.

"I'll be okay, sweetie," Bev says, coming to Eddie's side. She draws her hand down his face softly. "We're going to look after you."

"I have to go with him," Richie says, staring at Eddie's frightened face.

Bill makes a noise, like a bitter laugh. "You must be joking. You must be fucking kidding if you think I'll let you anywhere near him."

The anger bubbles under Richie's skin. He wants to bark at Bill. He wants to bite and rend. 

"Please," Ben says, and the hurt note in his voice cuts through the fog. "Not right now, not after what we've just been through. We can talk about this later, but we need to look after Eddie. And I can't be here for another second. Please, let's just go."

"Come on then, we'll cut through the woods," Mike says, and Richie gets one last look at Eddie before Mike takes him away.

"What happened down there?" Richie asks, but they ignore him, having already disappeared through the trees.

Bill hangs back behind the others. He looks at Richie, the air hanging low and tight between them. The face he gives Richie is steeped in violence, and he can almost taste the punch Bill wants to throw. The blood on his chin, the feel of the dislodged tooth flying from his mouth.

"Don't come back to the Town House anytime soon," he says. "I don't know what I'll do."

"Fine, I'll stay away," Richie says, battling against everything inside him that cries out, _no. No, Eddie is mine._

Bill turns away, but stops after a couple of steps. Quietly without looking at Richie he says, "Stan would have been ashamed of you."

With that sledgehammer to the gut, he leaves Richie there. 

As soon as he's out of sight, Richie's body goes limp, and he collapses, falling into the thick thrush at the edge of the lake. His entire body shudders, and before he can stop it, he starts to cry. He cries for Eddie, he cries for Stan. He cries for himself, he cries for all of their ruined childhoods. At some point, when the last of his tears have hiccuped out, when he's too tired to do anything but stare at the sky, Richie falls asleep.

He sleeps and he dreams of Eddie. Like he has every night of his life since leaving Derry, except now he's able to put a name to the freckled, dimpled face that smiles over his shoulder at him. Of the small legs in their tubed socks and red shorts. Of the sad voice that came out of the darkness to say, _Richie, why did you leave me?_ leaving Richie gasping for breath and covered in sweat as he surged awake in his LA penthouse.

 _There is no little boy, Richie_ , his therapist had said to him at one of their sessions, during one of Richie's darkest stints of withdrawal and reconciliation. _You see him as a reflection of the child you once were. The past self you feel the need to apologise to._

 _You're wrong, this isn't me_ , Richie had replied with gritted teeth, thinking of the boy’s dimples, and the smiling, freckled face that visited each of his dreams. _This boy is too beautiful and pure to ever be me._

When he wakes up, hours later, the slant of sunshine over the lake has changed, melting into early afternoon. A young family downstream splash into the lake, their little girl shrieking in delight. Their black Labrador bounds over and licks at Richie's arm before thrashing into the woods after a butterfly. When their father looks over, his balding head protected by a striped sun hat, he frowns.

"Hey, are you okay?" he asks, a hand slanted over his eyes to block out the sun.

Richie waves a hand at him, hoping he just looks like a homeless drunk who'd fallen asleep by the lake. 

"Are you sure? Aren't you..." his eyes go wide beneath the hat. "Hey, aren't you the comedian Richie Tozier?"

"Never heard of him," Richie says, as he picks himself up, scrambling around in the grass for his glasses, which had fallen off as he slept. 

His limbs feel wooden, and he aches all over like one deep bruise. Shaking the stiffness from his legs, he somehow finds the strength to trudge away from the lake, from the spot where they escaped Pennywise one last time. Where he had brought Eddie back to life.

Somehow he finds it in him not to look back.

He stays away from the Town House, as Bill requested. Though the need to be by Eddie's side scratches at him. 

_The only person who should be with him is me_ , the voice in his head says. _What the fuck does Bill know about looking after my boy?_

Richie finds his way to the nearest McDonalds, hastily ordering a Big Mac and a milkshake and shoving it into his face on the side of the road. Five minutes later he's vomiting it back up, thinking of Eddie's lifeless body by the lake, the way his head had hung limply as he dragged him out of the sewers. In the window across the street, his reflection is a tragedy: his clothes are torn and covered in muck; there's a cut on his head that's bled down the side of his face and dried into a thick crust; his glasses are filthy; and there's a dark, three-day stubble on his cheeks. 

You wouldn't think he was a famous comedian. You wouldn't think he was anything.

He ends up in one of Derry's grungiest bars on the edge of town - a haven for truckers, women looking for their next trick, and people who only found joy at the bottom of a bottle - and spends the afternoon drinking. Most people give him a wide berth - maybe it's the stench of the sewers or the blood - but he's still served without any questions. Derry, with its history of strange fires and child deaths, has seen much worse than him.

"You look like you've had a bad day, buddy," the bartender says as he fills up Richie's glass for the third time.

"This is a good day for me. I haven't passed out in my own vomit yet."

The bartender gives him a smile. One that was gap-toothed but genuine. "Well here's hoping your day changes course before then."

Richie lifts his drink, intending to cut the conversation short, but the booze loosens his tongue. Before he can stop himself he blurts, "The person I've been in love with for 35 years doesn't love me back. And I've done something that means he'll probably never want to see me again. He'll probably be fucking disgusted by me. And right now he's in the arms of a hack writer who once called himself my best friend."

"That sounds... like quite the story," the bartender says, politely not commenting on the fact Richie had just said he was in love with a man.

"It's a riot. You could write a fucking telenovela based on this shit. And you know what the worst part is? The worst part is, that thing I did, the one he'll never forgive me for, it was still the best fucking moment of my sad little life. And I don't know if that makes me a monster or not."

The bartender is quiet for a moment, as he wipes down the bar with a cloth from his waist.

"It sounds like it means you're human," he says finally.

"Yeah well, being human is overrated."

Some time later, when Richie's on his fifth drink and feeling increasingly drunk, an old timer hobbles up from his seat at the back of the bar.

"I don't have any quarters, so you'll have to find another way to put Phil Collins on the jukebox," Richie mutters against the rim of his glass.

"No, it's not that," the old man chuckles. "I saw you across the room and I couldn't help but wonder... you're Went Tozier's boy, ain't ya? You're the spitting image of him. Your father was a good man. Helped my little girl once with an abscess she had, even though we couldn't pay."

Richie hasn't thought about his dad in years - not since the letters started dwindling, the reprimands in them as harsh as red ink, and the phone calls petered out after Richie's last drunken escapade was all over the news - and he doesn't want to start thinking about him now.

"Am I right? Are you Went Tozier's boy?"

"Never heard of him," Richie says, as he knocks back his beer.

The man isn't phased. "Ah, come on, you don't need to be shy-"

Richie rounds on him, and the man shrinks back. Maybe from the look on his face, maybe from the blood.

"I said I don't know him. The name Tozier means _nothing_ to me."

The man doesn't bother him again.

By the time Richie's stumbled his way back to the Town House, night has fallen again. He feels hazy from the afternoon spent drinking, and the exhaustion bleeding into the corners of his vision, but he gets back without any major injuries. Which he counts as a resounding success.

The Town House is deathly quiet when he gets in. No one at the front desk. No one in the bar, or in the breakfast room. No one to see Richie trudge in like a monster from a horror movie. He wonders, not for the first time, if anyone else is even staying here. 

Upstairs, he finds Bev waiting outside of Eddie's room, slumped against the wall opposite his door. She's changed into some fresh clothes since getting back and washed the gore from her hair, but she still looks gaunt, her face lined with worry.

She tenses when she sees Richie, like she's just seen a panther prowl around the corner.

"Hey, are you okay?"

She nods. "We were wondering where you were. I was worried you might have left."

"Bill told me not to come back until tonight. I was in town, catching up with the locals."

Bev ignores his joke, her expression sharpening as he gets closer. "Have you been drinking? You reek of booze."

Richie tries to keep his voice light as he says, "Haven't you read about me online? Drinking myself into a stupor is what I do best."

She doesn't laugh. "Well that's hardly going to help Eddie."

Eddie. That itch gnaws at him again, the feeling he's had under his skin ever since Mike took Eddie from the woods. His entire left side had been aching all day, like he'd had his arm hacked off in the sewers. He'd put it down to nervous exhaustion, but being back at the Town House has made prickles erupt on that side of his body, like a trauma patient who starts to feel their legs again after weeks of being flattered from a car crash.

Richie looks at Eddie's door. Can almost feel him on the other side.

"Where is he anyway? Is he sleeping?"

"He's in his room with Bill."

An image rushes through Richie's head, of Bill at Eddie's bedside, stroking his hand through Eddie's hair gently, murmuring sweet things to him. Richie bites down the urge to barge his way into the room, but he forces a stiff smile instead.

"Well I'm sure the Boy Wonder is giving him everything he needs."

"Are you serious right now? Being jealous at a time like this?" Bev pauses before she says, "Besides, he's been asking for you all day."

Richie's heart does a double beat. "He's been asking for me? What did you tell him?"

"That you were resting. That he'd see you soon."

"Good, thanks."

He smiles at her, hoping some of the icy facade will melt. That she'll give him a hug. The two of them had been especially close when they were kids. He remembers the excitement he felt when he found out she was joining the group. Bev had been cool and edgy, he thought. But he soon found out that she was more than that too. She'd been one of the only Losers to tolerate his constant jokes, and she always took his opinions seriously, even when the others were rolling their eyes at him and telling him to stop being such a goofball. She'd been kind.

He suddenly remembers the way they'd ditch class to smoke outside of school, or when he'd sneak out of the house to hang out with her and look at the stars. He'd loved Bev more than he'd loved any other woman. She'd been his best friend.

But Bev continues to stare at Eddie's door, like Richie isn't even there.

"Does he remember anything?"

"Not really," she says. "He was mostly silent when we brought him to the library. He said a little bit more when he was back here in bed. I think he's in shock. Ben's asleep at the moment too. We said we'd take it in turns to watch him, in case," she shifts, "in case anything happens."

"What do you mean? Could there be side effects from the spell?"

Bev shakes her head. "We're not sure. Mike's back at the library, checking his books."

"Pennywise said it was from Sleeping Beauty. There might not be anything in his books about that."

"We'll just have to watch over him and see."

Bev hugs her arms around herself like she's suddenly cold. She's wearing a t-shirt and there are several nicks on her arms, like she'd been dragged against the floor or against a wall. He remembers the way the cavern had imploded when Pennywise transformed, shards of bone flying everywhere.

"Hey, for what it's worth, I'm really glad you got out of there okay."

Bev makes a bitter little noise. "What do you care?"

"What does that mean?"

She finally looks him in the face, and Richie shocks at the heated look in them.

"How could you leave us like that, Richie? We were down there fighting IT and you just left us. You didn't even look back."

"I'm sorry," Richie says, feeling the weight of the day crush down on him. "But the spell. I needed to get him out of there."

"Why was it up to you?"

"Christ, Bev, what was I supposed to do? You heard what IT said. He was going to waste away and we only had one chance to save him."

But Bev doesn't look convinced. "You risked everything to get him out of there. You could have gotten us all killed."

"Bev, I had to break the _spell._ "

"Stop saying that, Richie! We could have figured it out together. Like we always did when we were kids. There could have been something in one of Mike's books to break the spell, or there could have been another ritual. But you didn't even give us the chance."

"I'm sorry, okay? I didn't think."

"But that's your problem, Richie, you don't _think_. You never think when it comes to Eddie. Did it not occur to you that maybe IT was toying with us? That everything IT said was a lie? He loves games, you know that. But it doesn't matter. IT wanted to break us apart, and he knew the best way to do that was going through Eddie. Because you're stupid over him. You'd do anything for him. Even sacrificing everything we did to get here."

"I don't- it wasn't like that."

Some of the anger ebbs from Bev's face, leaving her face empty. "We didn't kill IT, Richie. We tried but we couldn't. There weren't enough of us."

The confession doesn't hit Richie like it probably should. Because all day he'd known. He'd made that choice when he took Eddie from the sewers. Had known it with certainty when he fell down by the lake to weep. IT was still down there, and it would be back again.

"IT'll be back and we won't be able to do anything next time," Bev continues. "We'll be too old. We're already too broken."

"We tried our best, Bev. There's nothing else we could do."

Bev looks like she's about to argue again, but she deflates, slumping further against the wall. The opposite of the bright, spunky girl he'd loved as a kid. "It doesn't matter," she says. "What happened today can never be undone. And we all have to live with that."

"Bev," he says, taking her by the shoulder. The movement forces her to look at him again, and he stumbles over his words as he says the thing that he'd locked away for his entire childhood. "I love him, okay? You heard what I said down there. I'm in love with him."

But Bev just looks desolate. "There's one word for what you feel about Eddie, Richie. And that's obsession."

Richie opens his mouth to say something else. He can't leave things between them like this, not after all this time. Except at that moment they're interrupted, as the door opens and Bill walks out of Eddie's room.

He looks as exhausted as Richie feels, with bags that bloom purple under his eyes and an expression so weary it could belong to a ghost. He stops dead when he sees Richie, closing the door quickly behind him before Richie can get a glimpse of Eddie.

"Finally crept back then?" he asks, his tone cold. He runs his eyes over Richie. "Did you go sleep in a ditch?"

"Sorry," Richie responds drily. "I left my best suit at the dry cleaners when Mike called the other day."

Bill ignores him. He says to Bev, "Do you want to see him? He's awake if you want to talk to him."

Bev nods, looking relieved. "Yes, I want to. I need to make sure he's okay."

"He's okay. Just tired and a little confused. And he's in pain," Bill looks at Richie, eyes accusing. "But we've patched him up as much as we can."

"He doesn't need to go to a hospital?"

Richie's skin goes icy. Had he really hurt him that badly?

But Bill shakes his head. "I don't think so."

"Who made you his caretaker anyway?" Richie says, bristling. 

_I claimed him,_ the voice says at the back of Richie's head. _That's my bite on Eddie's throat. Not yours._

"Richie, just don't," Bev says. She looks at Bill. "Are you two going to kill each other if I leave you alone?"

"It's fine, there's at least one adult here," Bill says tightly. "But you should go in while he's still awake."

Bev looks at Richie, bright eyes begging him not to do anything stupid, before slipping inside the room. As the door opens, Richie gets a glimpse of Eddie, lying on his side in bed, looking so small with the covers tucked tightly around him.

_He's alive, it wasn't just a trick. He's really alive, and he's here, and he's okay._

Bill turns to him as she closes the door. "Eddie doesn't want to see you," he says, folding his arms across his chest.

Richie huffs through his nose. "Oh yeah? Says who? You or him?"

"It doesn't matter. I'm not letting you anywhere near him."

"You decided then. Figures. Why don't you let him talk for himself for once?"

Bill gives him a corrosive little smile. "I thought that's the opposite of what you wanted?" He leans into Richie's space. "That's what you said in the sewers, right? That you didn't want Eddie to have a choice? That you wanted him to be pretty and pliant, to exist just for you and no one else?"

Richie feels the shame creep back in again.

In that moment, he wants to say it isn't true. That everything he said in the sewers was a lie. That he only said it to protect Eddie. But it wouldn't be true. Not after being 18-years-old and keeping it a secret that he loved Eddie. Like a dog chasing after a bone, stupid and droopy from it.

And he couldn't deny the fantasies. How he had thought about Eddie all the time, with a desperate, aching hunger that never settled. How just an hour of being around Eddie - in class, in the cafeteria, in the clubhouse - had clawed him into a frenzy. How he would go home, or sometimes into the bathrooms at school, and jerk off. He'd jerk off with a rough hand around his dick, groaning like a struck animal, thinking about Eddie's slender body. How easily he would be to tie up, to misuse. How his pouty little mouth would look popping around the thick tip of his dick, or how his small, pink asshole would blossom as Richie pushed inside him. How it nestled there between his legs, waiting so patiently to be pounded. 

As that last school year went on, the fantasies became more desperate, more degrading. He'd jerk off two, three, four times a day. And it was one lurid fantasy after the next, like flicking through a deck of cards with naked women on them.

One day it would be pushing down his shorts for Eddie to slurp noisily on his dick while the other Losers watched, knowing that Eddie was Richie's beautiful toy. Another it would be the two of them walking home from town, taking a short cut through the woods, when Richie would tell Eddie to get on his hands and knees so he could fuck him. And he would, until someone - a neighbour or a teacher - would catch them, their mouths falling open in shock as they saw Eddie's palms and knees scratched bloody from the forest floor, Eddie not even caring they'd been caught, too busy whining from being fucked full.

And on the darkest days, when nothing else would do, Richie would think of parting Eddie's juicy thighs, the ones that had teased him for years, and gently with the tip of his knife, carve his name into the soft baby flesh. On those days, he'd come so hard he'd shudder.

Instead, all Richie says is, "It's not like that," he says. "You know Pennywise twists things."

But Bill doesn't look convinced. "You know what, I think it would be best if you left."

"What, tonight?"

"Yeah, I think so. After what you did to Eddie, I think that would be best for all of us."

Richie doesn't flinch under Bill's glare, but he does feel the last threads of their friendship unravel. The ones that had started fraying the summer Bill had put his fist to Richie's face. Or even long before that, when Richie had watched Bill and Eddie together, and felt himself grow sick from jealousy. When he'd asked himself as he kicked a rock all the way home, _what was so fucking great about Bill Denbrough anyway._

"I'm not leaving," Richie says firmly. "Not until I see him."

Bill just shakes his head. "You don't think you've done enough damage?"

"I don't care."

"No, of course not. You never do. All you care about is what you want."

"I'm the one who saved him."

Bill's expression hardens even further. "Is that what you call what you did to him?"

Richie swallows, feeling shaky. "Fuck you, man."

But Bill doesn't stop. He comes closer to Richie, his blue eyes lit up with an icy kind of fury. 

"I wasn't even surprised about what you said in the sewers. I saw the way you looked at Eddie when we were kids. How much you clung to him, following him wherever he went. Why don't you think I ever left you alone with him?"

It was true. Bill never had. He'd always kept a watchful eye on him, especially that summer. Shielding him from Richie at the lake or sitting between them at the movies or when they went out for sodas. It drove Richie crazy, especially when Eddie started giving him little looks back. When his eyes met Richie's shyly from across the room while the others were talking, or when he'd hang back without Bill so he could walk home with Richie after school. Or the time he started laughing at Richie's jokes more. The real laugh, with the full blare of his megawatt dimples. He'd laugh as Richie stood there, grinning at him dumbly, heart like a drum in his chest, while Bill cast a small glower at them from across the room.

Richie says, "You just hated that Eddie started to look back. You hated that you weren't the centre of his life anymore."

Bill sneers. "You can pretend as much as you want, all this shit about saving his life. But don't pretend this was about Eddie when it was about you."

And there's something about the look on Bill's face - the belittling, dismissive slant of it - that boils his blood.

"And don't you pretend that you've ever been what Eddie needs," he says with bared teeth. "I got him out of there. I fucked his beautiful little body raw and came inside him. I saved him. What would you be doing? Still wringing your hands while the life bleeds out of him."

Bill's eyes shutter. "Stay away from me. I don't want to see you for the rest of the time we're here."

"Done," is all Richie says. "It'll be good to get out of here anyway. I won't have to be around your fucking god complex any longer."

A door opens down the hall, and Richie turns to see Ben's sleepy head peeking out at them, expression wary.

"What's going on?

"Nothing, man, go back to sleep."

"Richie, if you're causing trouble, you'll have to leave. I'm sorry, but we can't have this right now."

Christ. Even Haystack was turning on him now.

"I was just about to go back to my room, Jesus. Keep your fucking panties on."

Richie leaves the two men there, staring at him like he's a hurricane that's swept in and destroyed everything.

Back in his room, Richie strips out of his clothes, balling them into a sodden pile as he fights the urge to fall head-first onto his bed. There's come caked into his underwear and on the opening to his jeans, where he'd pulled them on too quickly after pulling out of Eddie. Just the thought of it, how it felt inside the hot clutch of Eddie's body, makes him twitch. Pennywise's words come back to him. _Which one of you will claim him?_

He realises he doesn't have the gun anymore. That he must have dropped it in the sewers after Pennywise transforms. But it doesn't matter. It had done its job. He wonders if Bowers had managed to crawl his way out. He hopes not. The guy deserved to rot down there.

Just before heading into the bathroom, something catches his eyes. A flash of scarlet on the floor, tucked under his jeans. A touch of foreboding hits him as he sees what it is. The rose that the doll gave him in Pennywise's lair. 

_A present for the Sewer Queen._

He crushes it in his fist and throws it into the trash can by the door, along with his clothes.

He finds the energy to shower, washing off the blood and grime, the streaks of come. He tries not to think about Eddie down the hallway. Tries not to picture slipping into his room when everyone else is sleeping. Of calling him darling. Of pushing into him, where he'd still be loose and wet. Tonguing the bite on his neck and listening to the way Eddie would gasp, making sure the bruise stayed fresh and red.

Guilt pierces him afterwards, when the chill of his room hits him, but he towels off, shucking on sweatpants and a t-shirt from his bag.

He's checking his phone, wincing at the 36 missed calls from his manager Todd asking him where the fuck he is and is he dead? And the frantic string of texts and Instagram notifications from Kit, who wants to know why he's being ignored, when there's a knock on his door. 

"Fuck off," he says, not in the mood for anymore heart-to-hearts or accusations. Maybe it's Bill, here for a second round.

"Richie," a small voice says behind the door, and Richie freezes. Eddie.

It takes two seconds for him to dive across the room and fling the door open. When he does, Eddie's big eyes make his heart trip. He's in a soft pair of sleeping pants and a t-shirt, and the thought trips through his head again like an electrical wire: _Eddie is alive._

"Are you okay? Is something wrong?" He pokes his head out to look down both sides of the hallway, but it's empty.

"I'm fine, Richie, nothing's wrong, really."

"What are you doing here then?"

Hurt flashes across Eddie's face, and Richie instantly feels like an asshole.

"I mean does Bill know you're here?"

Eddie frowns. "I'm not a child. I don't need Bill's permission to leave my room."

"He'll be pissed if he knows you're here. I'm kind of persona non grata at the moment. How did you get out of your room anyway?"

"Erm, Ben fell asleep by my bedside. I managed to slip out without him waking up."

"Little troublemaker," Richie teases, and a dimple peeks out shyly on Eddie's left cheek as he smiles.

Something melts inside Richie at that smile. He'd never been able to resist those dimples. Had fucked numerous people who'd had them over the years, had once rubbed the head of his dick across a guy's cheeks, the small dip of skin by his mouth making him feel feral, until he'd come messily over his face. It had been an improvement. Under the white mask of come, Richie had been able to pretend he had freckles.

"Can I come in?

Richie stares at him for a second, waiting for his brain to catch up. "What?"

Eddie sighs, clicking his tongue. "Your room, genius. Can I come in?"

Well obviously the brush with death hadn't done anything to dampen Eddie's sassiness. Figures. 

"Sure, I just didn't think you'd want to come in before I'd rolled out the red carpet for you, sweetness."

Richie opens the door wide, sweeping his arm around in a full, dramatic arch to welcome Eddie inside.

"Thanks," Eddie says as he walks in, obviously trying not to smile.

He moves gingerly and Richie tries not to think about why. What could be causing him to move so slowly. It definitely couldn't be the way Richie had rammed his cock inside that little body a few hours before. Rutting into him in the woods like an animal. Richie's eyes instinctively flicker to Eddie's neck, to the fresh white bandage that's been pressed there. He wants to rip it off, see what it's hiding.

Eddie looks around the room, at the chaos of Richie's clothes and his unmade bed. "You really haven't changed one bit, have you?"

"You can't improve perfection, Eds," Richie says automatically.

 _Why do you feel the need to hide your true feelings behind jokes?_ his therapist had once asked him, after a car crash and a cancelled tour had him washed up on the side of the road, a gun in his hands. _Is it because you're frightened of people seeing who you really are?_

Eddie looks over his shoulder at him, and Richie feels the breath knocked out of him at how beautiful he is.

"Is that what they call pigs these days?"

"Ouch, Eds, you bruise me."

Eddie's eyes slide down to his t-shirt. The Trashmouth 2014 tour one. "You got changed."

"Er, yeah."

"What did you do with your clothes?"

"Threw them away. I don't think blood and sewer water is good for my look."

"It might be an improvement if anything."

Richie thumbs at the door behind him. "Hey, if you've come here just to bully me I might have to ask you to leave."

Eddie gives him a little smile. He looks wan and tired, but Richie's just relieved at the blotch of pink back in his cheeks. That his eyes are the same deep, glistening brown. An image of him lying limp on the bank of the lake flicks through his mind, of his bloodless lips, the delicate tracing of purple veins on his eyelids, how heavy and dead he'd felt in his arms, and he suddenly feels sick.

"What's wrong?" Eddie asks.

"Nothing, I'm good," Richie says, running his hand through his hair.

"You know you're a fucking terrible liar."

"I tell lies for a living, Eds, I can't be terrible at it."

"I've read some reviews to the contrary," Eddie says airily. 

Richie can't help the grin crawl over his face. "Oh yeah? Keeping dibs on me, huh?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

He's about to fire something back, except his mouth goes dry as Eddie sits daintily on his bed, using a hand to smooth down the bedspread.

Richie whirls around and busies himself with stuffing some clothes into his bag.

"God, you even have crumbs on this. What were you doing? Eating an entire bag of Doritos in bed?"

"A god-tier snack, I'll have you know." 

"Too dry," Eddie says, making Richie snort.

They haven't been alone in a bedroom like this since they were kids, and it was hard enough then. He remembers one night at a sleepover at Bill's when Eddie had changed into his oversized Thundercats t-shirt and announced he was ready to sleep, hugging his teddy bear tightly to his chest. They had been 14. Bill and Richie looked at each other and laughed their guts out, while Eddie asked what the hell was so funny.

"Have you been able to sleep?" 

"A little," Eddie says from the bed. "But I had nightmares. Keep thinking I should be in New York."

Being careful to keep his tone steady he says, "Bev says you can't remember anything."

"No, not really. A flicker here or there but that's it. I remember dolls I think... and a castle? I don't know, it's all faded." Eddie's voice stays impassive as he says it. Maybe a little too much. But then, in an alarmed voice, "Do you think we did it, Richie? Do you think IT's dead now?"

Richie stops his fumbling, swallows. "Yeah, baby, I think so."

"You don't think IT will come back? I know we couldn't do the ritual." 

"We did what we could, we hurt IT pretty bad."

"But last time we thought that too. And we'll be too old if IT comes back again." Eddie's voice starts to rise, sounding panicked at the edges. "This is all my fault. If I hadn't been taken, if IT hadn't put that fucking spell on me, we could have done the ritual. Maybe if I wasn't so fucking _weak_ -"

Eddie doesn't have time to finish before Richie's over by the bed, kneeling in front of him, his hand on Eddie's chin.

"Hey, don't you ever fucking say that again," he says in a harsher tone than he intends. "You're the bravest, strongest person I know."

Eddie just looks at him with wide eyes. The same ones he'd had as a child, when he'd been on the verge of a panic attack.

"Tell me you understand, come on," Richie says, firmly tapping the side of his face. In moments like this, Eddie always needed to be grounded. 

"I understand," he says softly.

"Okay, good." 

"But you're the one who saved me." Eddie flushes. "I know, I woke up and you were there. You got me out."

Richie strokes his thumb along Eddie's chin, savouring the feeling of his skin. "Yeah, but you're the one who hung on. You're such a good boy."

Richie feels the tremble that goes through Eddie's body, hears the little gasp he makes. 

He drops his hand - is on the verge of telling some stupid joke - when Eddie grabs his hand, bringing it back to his chin.

"It feels nice," he says quietly. 

Richie feels all the spit dry up in his mouth. "Okay," he says, as he resumes his stroking. "That's fine."

They stay like that for a couple of minutes, Richie kneeling by the bed as Eddie leans into his touch. He can't remember the last time he touched Eddie like this. Maybe when they were kids, when they got out of the sewers. When Eddie stumbled into his arms and hugged him so hard Richie had been speechless. Had just wrapped his arms around him and held him like that for what felt like hours.

Eddie breaks the silence, saying, "I was so scared, Richie," in a hushed, frightened tone that breaks Richie's heart.

"I know, sweetheart."

"I really thought it was the end. That I'd die alone down there, surrounded by all those bones of dead kids, and I'd never get to show everyone how hard I could fight. How much everyone means to me. I'd never get to tell you-" he stops short, his face blanching. 

"What? Tell me what?"

Eddie shakes his head. "It doesn't matter."

"I'll never let anything bad happen to you. Do you believe me?"

Eddie nods, face soft. "I do."

"Good."

Richie almost jumps when he feels Eddie's hand on his own face, his fingertips trailing slowly over his busted lip.

"He shouldn't have hit you like that," Eddie murmurs, as he frowns at the cut on Richie's lip. "It wasn't right."

"Eh, you know, I'm a total asshole," he says, trying to keep the tremor from his voice. 

How much did Eddie remember? Did he remember waking up and seeing Richie above him? Feeling him inside him? He'd obviously bathed since getting back, but Richie had been so deep inside him. Was he still dripping his come? The thought makes that hunger snick in the bottom of Richie's belly. Makes him spread his legs, as his dick twitches hard between them. Was Eddie still sore from where he'd fucked him red? 

Eddie's eyes flicker up to the cut on his head. "Is that okay? Do you want me to look at it? I have bandages back in my room."

"I think I'm good, Nurse Kaspbrak," Richie says with a grin, cutting off a joke about playing doctor just before it leaves his mouth.

"Fine, asshole, enjoy getting sepsis." 

And maybe it would sound angry if Eddie wasn't starting to look so sleepy, his eyes drooping as he leans into Richie's hand.

"Hey, you tired? Want to go back to your room?"

"Actually, I was hoping... could I sleep here instead?"

 _Oh god._ A thousand snapshots flip through his head of what Eddie would look like in bed beside him. Of all the things he could show Eddie in just one bed and with one night at their disposal. But he promptly shuts them down, even as the voice inside him yowls, _yes yes yes_.

Richie tries to keep his tone light as he says, "Like our old sleepovers?"

"Yeah. I know it's dumb but I... I feel safe with you, I can't explain it."

"You don't have to explain. Of course you can sleep here."

Eddie looks relieved. "Thanks, Rich. And there's another thing too..."

"Shoot."

"Can I-" he stops, looking embarrassed.

"What is it? You can have anything, if I have it. Unless you want Taco Bell. It's too far out of town."

Eddie's face crumples like he's about to be sick. "I've never eaten Taco Bell in my life. It's disgusting."

Richie tries to keep his mouth in a straight line as he says, "Yes, of course. My bad."

"I was going to ask if I can wear your t-shirt?"

Richie's pretty sure he blacks out for a minute, because the next thing he knows Eddie's pushing lightly at his shoulder.

"Richie? Are you having a seizure?"

"No, I just... you want to wear my t-shirt?"

"If that's okay..."

"Sure, totally. I just - er, you want a clean t-shirt out of my bag?"

"No, I was thinking I could..." Eddie's cheeks flush harder and Richie thinks he could get drunk off how he looks. "I want the one you're wearing?"

"This one?" Richie gestures at his chest, feeling faint.

"Yeah. Sorry, it's fucking weird, don't worry about it."

"Nah it's cool, just a sec."

Richie gets up and before he can bottle it from nerves, rucks his t-shirt up and pulls it over his neck.

The look he gets as he bares his chest to Eddie makes it all worth it. The slim, short men Richie had usually taken home had always teasingly described him as a bear and while Richie's pretty sure he's too gangly for that, he's always found some kind of sexual power in the width of his chest and the dark swathe of hair there. Growing up, with his huge glasses and buck teeth, Richie never thought men might one day find him attractive. But the way his pick-ups stared at him as he got undressed and pressed them to his bed, showed him they could.

Seeing the same kind of look on Eddie's face - his mouth parted, eyes wide - makes his nerve ends tingle. Makes the air grow thick between them.

"Er-" Richie clears his throat, "here you go."

Eddie takes the t-shirt from him, tearing his gaze from Richie's chest to look at his own knees.

"You look different, you know, to what I thought."

"Oh yeah? What did you think I'd look like?"

Eddie lifts a small shoulder in a shrug, as he runs his finger along the t-shirt. "I don't know, Rick Moranis?"

Richie can't help it. He barks with laughter. And it feels good. It feels so good to laugh, genuinely, after what felt so long.

"Shit, thanks a lot. I don't even get Jeff Goldblum. Fuck my life."

Eddie gives him an apologetic smile. "Well, you don't look like Rick Moranis at least?"

"Great, thanks. I love getting such stellar compliments from beautiful men."

Eddie flushes at that, the smile falling off his face. "You think I'm beautiful?"

_Eddie, you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen._

"Yeah, you're all right, I guess," Richie goes for instead.

Eddie looks back at the t-shirt, looking thoughtful. "Thanks," he says quietly. "I'll go get changed."

"Sure," Richie says chirpily, his voice a little too high.

 _Fuck, get it together,_ he thinks. _It doesn't have to be a big fucking deal. It's just the love of your life getting naked in your bathroom and asking to sleep in your bed a few hours after you saved him from a monster clown and fucked his unconscious body in the forest._

Eddie comes out after a few minutes, his own clothes folded neatly in his arms. The sight of his small body engulfed in Richie's t-shirt, his bare legs on display, slays Richie. Makes him swipe a tongue across his bottom lip. Eddie's in his t-shirt and he's probably still dripping his come.

They stand there staring at each other. And Richie wonders how to crack jokes when his heart is pounding like this.

"Happy now you've stolen my clothes?"

"It smells like you," Eddie says. He fiddles with the hem where it falls mid-thigh.

Jesus, what the fuck was he supposed to say to that?

"You should feel honoured about being covered in my manly musk."

Eddie rolls his eyes. "Do you ever shut up?"

"You might get a break when I fall asleep. Do you want to hit the hay now?"

Eddie starts to nod, but then something catches his eye.

"Richie, what's this?" He bends down to pluck the crushed rose out of the trash.

His expression changes as he touches it, going hazy and relaxed. Just how he looked in the sewers.

"A rose..." he says dreamily, stroking its petals with his fingertips.

Richie's next to him in an instant, tearing it from his hand. 

"Hey, what's your problem?" Eddie says angrily.

"That's not for you, okay?"

Eddie looks at it again. "Who's it for then?"

"It doesn't matter, it's a truck stop rose. Got forced onto me by some guy selling flowers. It's probably got rabies."

"I don't think that's how that works," Eddie says, looking slightly forlorn as Richie throws it in the trash again.

"It doesn't matter, come on. Let's get you to bed."

Eddie relents, sliding into the side of the bed nearest the window and pulling the covers up to his chest. The small intimacy of the act has Richie reeling. That woman back in New York didn't deserve to see Eddie like this every night, the way he plumped his pillows and tucked the sheets around him.

Eddie frowns when Richie grabs the pillows on the other side.

"What are you doing? Aren't you going to sleep in bed too?"

_Christ._

"If you want me to. I can go on the floor if you want, I don't mind."

"No, I... I'd like you to stay here."

"Are you sure? Remember the way I used to elbow you during our sleepovers?"

Eddie cringes, as if remembering a past injury. "You had the sharpest knees, it sucked. I'd always wake up with bruises."

"Sure you want to put yourself through that again?"

He feels his skin heat again as Eddie's eyes trip over his chest. "I think it'll be okay. You've filled out a bit since then."

"I'm fat, I get it, Eds."

"I didn't say _that_."

"I'm joshing, chill. Now move over, you blanket hog."

"What are you even talking about? I'm only taking up my side."

Richie laughs, he can't help it. He'd forgotten how good it felt to bicker with Eddie. How comforting it was just to be around him.

He slides into the other side. Usually he'd take off his sweatpants, but he doesn't think Eddie will appreciate sleeping next to his buck naked body.

Settling back with his head on the limp motel pillow he asks, "Are you comfy?"

Eddie squirms like he's lying on a sack of frozen peas. "Not really, these beds suck."

"I know, princess."

He winces as soon as he says it. Was it okay to call him that now? After what Pennywise had done?

But Eddie doesn't seem to mind, just calls him an asshole. "I bet you have $20,000-dollar sheets in your LA mansion or whatever."

"Nah, I spend it all on hamburgers."

That does the trick and Richie lies there, trying not to have an aneurysm, as Eddie giggles beside him. He feels like he's 12-years-old again, when the Losers would all sleep together on the floor of the clubhouse, bundled up in sleeping bags and blankets. Richie and Eddie would always sleep next to each other, and Richie just stared at the ceiling, his heart pounding, as Eddie's arm or leg pressed gently against his.

"Sleep now?" he asks, once Eddie's giggles have died down.

Eddie nods, pressing his face into the pillow. 

Richie turns his head and watches him for a moment, taking in the gentle slope of his nose, the dark fan of lashes against his cheek, the smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose. Thinks of all the times he watched Eddie sleep, during sleepovers, and at the clubhouse. No wonder he'd spent his life chasing men who looked like Eddie. Always bringing home small, dark-haired men. No wonder freckles or dimples always brought him to his knees. Even though he hadn't remembered him. Eddie was just exquisite. How could anyone else ever compare to him?

"Thanks, Richie," Eddie murmurs suddenly, his eyes still closed.

Richie jumps. "What for?"

"For saving me. I knew you would. I knew you'd come for me..."

Richie feels his eyes prickle. Eddie had always been the softest when he was on the verge of falling asleep. When all his walls came down, the armour he built around himself falling to his feet. It had been the same when they were kids too.

"I'll always come for you, Eddie," he says, but Eddie doesn't hear him. Has fallen asleep, curled protectively onto his side.

Sometime later, when his heart has calmed down and his limbs have grown heavy, he falls into a deep sleep too.

He wakes up sometime later to a rustling and a low sound that sounds like a moan. He's not sure what time it is, but it's dark outside. He struggles to remember where he is for a second - this isn't his bed back home, it isn't as hot like LA nights should be - when his brain catches up.

He startles when he feels the hand around his dick, pulling at him frantically. 

He jerks his head off the pillow and looks down - to a sight that almost kills him on the spot: Eddie's dark head between his legs, staring down at his dick where he's pulled down his sweatpants just below his balls, trying valiantly to jerk him off even though he's only half-hard.

Scrambling at his bedside table, he finds his glasses and flicks on the lamp, flooding the room and Eddie in a hushed golden light.

"Eddie, baby? What are you-" he cuts off on a groan as Eddie rubs his fingers along the vein on his dick.

"Please, Richie, need you," Eddie whines, as he stares at Richie's cock. He moves his hand again - so small around Richie's dick, which is chubbing up fast - and even though his palm is too dry and his grip slightly too tight, it doesn't stop his hips from bucking up into Eddie's hand.

Richie wonders for a second if he's dreaming. Because the sensuous thing between Richie's legs can't be Eddie. Not the anxious, highly strung man who'd been buzzing on the edge of a perpetual panic attack ever since he got back. No, this man was a beautiful, lithe little thing with glittering eyes and a slutty, moaning mouth who looked like he needed to get fucked.

Richie reaches down to get his hand on Eddie's chin, making him tear his eyes from Richie's cock.

"Eddie, are you okay? Talk to me, come on."

Eddie shakes his head. "I had nightmares again and I- I woke up and I just needed to touch you."

"Maybe we should stop, talk about this?"

"No, need you, please."

Richie groans at the way his voice cracks on the _please._ He sounds so desperate, and he looks it too: his mouth is parted on a small pant, and his dark eyes are hooded where he stares at Richie with an expression he's never seen on him before. An expression of pure, heated longing. 

"Eddie, you don't have to- I didn't expect this when I said you could sleep here, sweetheart."

But whatever he's going to say next evaporates as he watches Eddie lower his head to mouth at Richie's cock.

"Your cock is so big, Richie," he says, swirling his tongue around the leaking head. "Big stupid pornstar dick."

"What would you know about porn, huh?" Richie says shakily, panting as Eddie reaches down to feel his balls, where they feel big and full again. He hisses through his teeth as Eddie fondles them, rolling them in his hand. But only gently, like a little fucking cock tease.

"I used to watch it... when Myra was out. I'd watch it and pretend I was the guy getting fucked."

And Richie can just see it: Eddie getting back from work and covertly watching gay porn on his iPad while he's supposed to be taking a shower, slipping a hand into his pants as he watches some tiny twink get fucking railed by a meathead with a huge cock. 

" _Jesus_ ," he hisses, as the head of his dick gets sucked into the warm, wet pink of Eddie's mouth.

He'd fantasised about this a million times as a teenager. Of how it would feel if Eddie sucked his dick. In those fantasies he looked like this too: pink-cheeked and utterly shameless, looking like he was doing to die if he didn't get to taste Richie. And sometimes it was rougher than that. He'd fantasise about pushing Eddie to his knees and forcing his cock down his throat, not caring when Eddie gagged, just needing that tight, ripping, wet heat around him. In those fantasies he'd fuck Eddie's mouth until he cried - big, fat, messy tears too - and only then would he pull out, savouring the way Eddie would gasp, his tiny chest shuddering as he presented his heated cheeks for Richie's come.

Richie lies there, trying so hard not to buck into Eddie's soft, pouty mouth as the old fantasy whips through his head. This was probably the first time Eddie had ever gone down on a man, he couldn't be too rough. But man does the thought of fucking Eddie's mouth make him leak.

Eddie's mouth pops off the head of his dick, to tongue at the slit. "Mmm, Richie, you taste good," he hums.

"Thanks, baby, _fuck_."

"Can't believe you fit all this inside me," Eddie continues, as he kisses wetly along the length of Richie's dick. "Can still feel you humping into me."

"Don't say that," he groans. 

"I've felt empty all day. Touched myself in bed while the others thought I was asleep."

" _Christ_ , Eddie-"

Eddie trails his mouth down further, nuzzling at the thick, dark hair at the base of Richie's cock. Then he does something that almost ends Richie: he sucks one of his balls into his mouth and moans around it as he jerks Richie off, in a move from a fucking gay porno.

Richie's head falls back against his pillow, neck arching as he listens to Eddie's appreciative little noises, how he moans wetly as he licks at Richie's balls, sucking on one and then the other. He widens his legs for Eddie to settle between them, can't help the way his hand moves down to Eddie's head, not pushing, just cupping it around the back of his neck as his head bobs lightly between his legs.

In a daze, he wonders how Bill would look if he barged in right now and saw them like this. Saw his sweet little Eddie between Richie's legs, nuzzling at his hard cock, if he knew he'd jerked Richie off while he'd been asleep so he could fuck his mouth on it.

Eddie kisses his way back to Richie's dick, letting the first few inches push his lips open as Richie curses. He stays like that for a few minutes, just bobbing his head onto Richie's cock with a lazy, slow rhythm, every now and then tonguing at Richie's slit like he's savouring the way he tastes. 

He suddenly pulls off with a wet, popping sound. "Do you like it?" he asks, sounding so coy for a man who just had a mouth full of cock.

"Yeah, feels fucking amazing."

He strokes his hand down Eddie's cheek, pulse exploding at the way Eddie sucks his thumb into his mouth.

"You want to suck me off? Let me come in your mouth?"

And fuck, he wants that. Wants to watch Eddie kitten lick his way down his cock, maybe hold him up by the hair and fucking up his mouth slowly, watching those lips stretching around his dick. Then when he's ready, make him stick his tongue out to catch every last drop of Richie's come.

But Eddie shakes his head, swallowing thickly. "I need you to fuck me."

Richie's head fills with white noise, and he pulls his hand away, making Eddie whine. 

"You- what?"

"I need you to fuck me," Eddie repeats, pawing at his thigh. "Please, Richie, please. Need you to fill me up again."

"Am I dreaming?"

He wonders for a second if he's stuck in the Deadlights. No way could this be happening. No way would Eddie ever proposition him like that. Not after a childhood of Eddie telling him how dumb he was; of looking at him like he was a bug that needed to be squashed. 

But Eddie doesn't answer him, going back to jerking Richie off, slicker now with the spit from Eddie's mouth.

"Used to think about getting fucked," Eddie mumbles, making Richie's dick jump in his hand. "Used to touch myself when Myra was out, think about a big, strong man coming in and taking me. Just coming in and fucking me, doing whatever he wanted to me, before leaving."

And Richie remembers - remembers the forced confession down in the sewers.

"Sometimes, I thought about you doing it."

Richie's head shoots off the pillow again. "What did you say?"

"I'd watch your stand-up and touch myself."

"Oh Jesus, you're going to kill me, Eddie. What the fuck."

"I thought you were so _annoying_ , you weren't even funny half the time, but you were so handsome too." 

_Handsome._ Trust Eddie to use a sweet, old-fashioned word like that even when he's jerking a guy off.

"Will you fuck me again?" Eddie asks again. "Please?"

"Yes, fuck, I will," he says, feeling weak. As if he could turn Eddie down, with him looking and sounding like this.

Eddie sighs - the sound of a man who's just found air after almost drowning - and shuffles up the bed so he's straddling Richie's hips.

In the lamplight, Eddie shrugs off the t-shirt, revealing his gorgeous little body in the lamplight. Richie drinks it all in like he did in the sewers. His slim chest, the slight jut of his ribs, the way his body flares out at his hips, the tanned juiciness of his thighs. Richie's mouth waters at the way his pretty dick rises between his legs, so hard and ready for him. Wonders how he would taste if Richie put his mouth on him.

"Jesus Christ, you're gorgeous, Eddie," he says, hands coming up to Eddie's tiny waist.

And he was. Richie had slept with a lot of guys over the years - some beautiful guys too, including a couple of runway models and a handful of actors. He also hadn't felt shy about fucking cute guys who'd come to watch his stand-up or when he did SNL and who'd wait outside the venue for him, where they'd ask coyly for an autograph and he'd say, "Why don't we go for a drink instead?" The night would usually end in Richie smoking a cigarette in bed, as the guy hastily dressed and thanked him for a nice evening before half-running out the door.

But not one of them looked like Eddie.

"Where did you get these from anyway," he teases, as he runs his hands along Eddie's hips. "Did you steal these from a woman"? He reaches back to grip the juicy ass that had tormented Richie for years. The type of ass that would jiggle if it got spanked. "Who gave you this fat ass, huh?"

Eddie hiccups, face flushing red. Shy sweetheart.

"You're so sexy too, Richie," he breathes, as he trails his hands over Richie's chest. "Wanted you inside me ever since we got back."

"Oh, man." He feels the shaky filter between his head and his mouth break. "You could have had it, baby. Would have fucked you right there at the restaurant if you'd wanted it. As soon as I saw you. Just dragged you to the bathroom and fucked you in the cubicle. Or in my car after we left. All you had to do was say the word and I would have had my dick inside you in seconds."

Eddie shudders. "Oh my god, Richie."

Richie trails his hands up Eddie's sides, making Eddie squirm when he runs his fingers over the ticklish skin on his ribs. His hands come up to bracket him just under the armpits, and he revels in how small Eddie is. He's so small, Richie's hands span his entire chest.

"God, baby, you're like a little Barbie doll. I could break you so easily."

Eddie arches as he says that, the sharp movement making their dicks grind together. They both groan brokenly at the same time, Eddie making a mumbled noise in the back of his throat, dropping his chin so he can watch the filthy sight of their dicks sliding together. And Richie thinks he could come just from this. Just from taking Eddie by the waist and making him grind over his dick like a stripper.

His brain comes back online when he sees Eddie lifting himself above the thick, pointed tip of Richie's erection, moaning as it brushes between his cheeks, right against his soft, sore opening. He whines when Richie stops him from sinking down, with a bruising grip on his waist.

"Eddie, hold on, you're going to hurt yourself," he says. "I can't take you dry."

Eddie shakes his head, eyes hooded. "I'll be okay. I'm still wet with your come."

"Fuck!" Richie knocks his head back against his pillow.

"I've felt your come inside me all day. It's been dripping out of me since we got back."

And Christ, Richie was about to fucking _explode_.

"I need to get lube," he manages to say, "you're still sore from earlier."

"But-"

"No buts, Eddie."

Because Richie knew - it wasn't something he went around bragging about every day, but he knew he had a big dick. His partners had commented on it for years, eyes going wide when they'd see Richie naked for the first time - and social media had a bout of insanity last year when Richie had trekked out to the bodega down his street in sweatpants and no underwear. The memes calling him "Big Dick Tozier" had gone on for months. Plus he hadn't fucked a virgin in a long time, probably not since he was a virgin himself. And Eddie was small and bird-boned. The last thing he wanted to do was ruin that candy-pink hole between Eddie's legs, even if the thought sent a hot sizzle through him.

With Eddie perched on his thighs, he reaches down at the side of the bed and rustles frantically through his bag until he finds the sachet of lube and a condom, still there from seeing Kit a few days ago. The day before he got the phone call from Mike.

Eddie makes a face when he sees the condom in his hand.

"I don't want that."

"Huh?"

"The _condom_ , Richie. I don't want you to wear one."

Richie swallows thickly, wondering if he's hearing Eddie right. His Eddie - sweet little germaphobe Eddie who as a child would scream if he even got a speck of dirt on his clothes - was asking Richie to fuck him bare? 

"Are you sure? It'll be safer this way and you won't have to clean up afterwards."

Eddie shakes his head. "I don't want it. I love the feel of your come inside me."

"Jesus fuck," Richie groans, tipping his head back. "What did you do with Eddie Kaspbrak, huh? Always knew you were secretly a changeling."

He expects a swift reprimand - Eddie had hated being called things like a pixie and changeling growing up - but he just stares at Richie with hooded lids as Richie tears open the sachet and rubs a slick palmful of lube all down his hard dick. 

"Sweetheart, take some and rub it into your hole. It'll make it easier."

Eddie shivers as Richie squeezes the excess lube into his hand. He reaches between his legs, and Richie grits his teeth, looking away, trying not to think too hard about the wet squelch of Eddie's fingers or how fucking hot he looks getting himself ready to take Richie's cock. How much he'd like to knock Eddie's hand away and flip him over on the bed, so he can use his own fingers on him. See how many he can push into Eddie's tight hole before he cries out. If he could fit in all four fingers. Maybe his thumb too. If Eddie would sob from the hard stretch.

"I'm ready, Richie," Eddie pants after a minute of clumsy fumbling between his legs. "I'm ready, please."

That's when Richie sees it - a glimmer of gold threading through Eddie's eyes.

Richie's hand shoots up from the mattress and he grabs Eddie's chin. 

"Richie, what are you-"

"Look at me."

Eddie does, and relief surges through him when he sees Eddie's eyes are his usual deep brown.

He exhales slowly, feeling like an idiot. Maybe it had been a trick of the light, maybe it had just been his imagination. 

"Sorry, baby, I thought-"

"Are you going to fuck me or not?"

Richie raises a brow at him, hands creeping back up to Eddie's hips. "Bossy, are we?"

Eddie bites down hard on his bottom lip. "I just want it so bad," he says, his voice melting like sugar. "Please give it to me."

And Richie knows - he knows somewhere deep down that this is wrong. Eddie might be confused, and even if he isn't, a few hours ago he'd been down in Pennywise's lair, on the verge of being that evil fucker's slave. But it doesn't stop him, because his dick pulses heavily at the thought of being buried inside Eddie again. Doesn't stop him from getting his hands on Eddie's hips and helping to lift him up over the bulbous tip of his dick.

"Like this, baby, sink down on me." 

Eddie tries to, but the mess of lube makes him slip on Richie's dick. He makes a wet, little unhappy noise in the back of his throat.

It's clumsy and virginal, and so fucking hot it makes Richie's jaw clench.

"Baby, do you need me to-"

He loses the ability to speak when Eddie reaches down between his legs to grip Richie's dick, pressing it up against his fluttering hole. And Richie can't help but groan as he feels his come - the load he'd left in Eddie that morning- dripping out of Eddie onto the head of his dick. And it shoots through him again, how it felt dumping his balls into Eddie's lax, still body. How he'd hiked Eddie's hips up to make sure it all got inside.

"God, baby, filled you up, didn't I?"

Eddie nods, eyes glazed, and that's when it happens - Richie's dick catches on his rim, and they both groan as the head pops in. 

"That's it, sweetheart, just like that, baby, yeah," Richie mumbles, stomach trembling from how badly he wants to thrust up all the way, completely bury himself balls deep in his boy's beautiful body. But he makes himself go slow, his hands guiding Eddie's hips down.

And fuck, Eddie's tight. Even tighter than he felt that afternoon, when Richie had pulled his legs apart and pushed inside him. When he'd rutted him into the ground like he was a prize he'd just won at the county fair. Now the slow glide of tight heat gripping his cock has Richie panting.

"Do you feel that, gorgeous?" he asks, pressing his fingers into Eddie's hips. "Feel your cherry popping on me?"

"Yeah," Eddie says, his little chest heaving. 

"Bet you never thought you could take a dick this big, right?"

Eddie goes to say something, but then his body tightens up. He makes a little noise, like he's hurt himself.

And shit, Richie knows the stretch must be a lot. No wonder it hurts.

"Do you need to stop, baby? We can-"

But Eddie doesn't wait. Like the brave, determined thing he's always been, he pushes down on the rest of Richie's cock, sucking it all up inside him as he bites down on his lip. He doesn't stop until he's seated on Richie's hips, trembling as the full length of Richie splits him open.

Christ, and Richie thinks he's going to pass out. Can only lie there groaning as his dick gets sheathed in Eddie's tight little body.

Above him, Eddie makes a thin, wounded noise. "Hurts," he mumbles.

"I know, sweetheart," Richie says, stroking his hips. "Just take a minute to adjust. Here, circle your hips a little for me." 

Eddie, like the sweet thing he is, does. He starts making tiny circles with his hips, the motion of it making Richie's eyes roll back.

"Does that feel good?" Eddie asks. 

"Yeah, baby, feels fucking incredible."

"I want it to be good for you too."

"Of course it's good. I've been dreaming about you for years."

"I have too."

Richie's eyes fly open. He stares up at Eddie, where he's panting, dark eyes glittering in the lamplight, chest covered in a thin sheen of sweat. God, he's never had someone as gorgeous as Eddie on his dick before.

"What?"

"I thought about you too. Always wanted you to be my first."

Richie's dick twitches inside of Eddie, slicking him up even more with a blurt of precome.

"You did?"

"Yeah..."

"Since when?"

"When we were kids," Eddie says, the words pouring out of him like a church confession.

And fuck, does that image burn through Richie. Eddie had thought about him like this when they were _kids_?

He swallows, managing to find his voice as Eddie strokes his fingers through his chest hair.

"Fuck, like I said, baby, I would have fucked you as soon as you asked. Came over and fucked you when you were alone in the house. All you had to do was ask and you could have had my dick inside you all the time. Wouldn't have wanted to ever pull out."

Eddie breathes shakily above him. "Fuck, _Richie_ -"

"I'm going to start moving now, baby, okay?"

Eddie nods, and Richie would laugh at the frantic nodding of his head, if it wasn't so fucking sexy.

He starts rocking Eddie's hips for him, a slow motion back and forth that makes both of them moan.

"Tell me how that feels. Does that feel nice?"

Eddie starts to nod, to say it does, but then his body locks up suddenly. And Richie knows from the strangled sound he makes in the back of his throat, the way his thighs clamp around Richie, trembling hard, that he's just hit his sweet spot.

"What-" he breaks off as he moans - but this time it's a broken, whining moan in the back of his throat. Something that instantly makes Richie's nipples pebble, the flesh on his arms breaking out in goosebumps. It's a sound like Eddie's dying, and he fucking loves it.

"That's your prostate, baby," Richie says, "little spot inside you that's going to make you see fireworks when I hit it."

"Do it again, Richie, please. Please, please do it again," Eddie babbles, fingers digging into the hair on Richie's chest.

"All right," Richie husks on a laugh. 

His fingers dig bruises into Eddie's hips as he thrusts up. He knows he finds that spot again when Eddie yelps. As his pretty dick smacks a wet trail against his flat belly. As Eddie pushes his ass down shamelessly, chasing that feeling like a slut who's just found his g-spot for the first time.

He reaches around Eddie to finger the skin around his rim, feels himself grow feral at how hot and tight the skin feels around his dick. 

"Do you feel that, sugar? This is where we're connected."

Eddie whines brokenly again, looking strung out.

"Tell me how it feels," he says, pushing at the sore skin around his dick.

"I love it."

"Is that right? Love being full of my cock?"

"Yes, _yes_ , I love it so much."

And Richie knows he's on shaky ground. He shouldn't be saying shit like this to Eddie. Not with what he's been through. Not after the intensity of the day they've had. He should be gentle. But the hunger that's been snapping at him since he got back burns hot in his belly, and he can't stop the words coming out of his mouth when he says, "God, I could be so nasty to you if I wanted to be."

Eddie shivers, and Richie can feel it on the inside, how his tight ass clenches around his cock.

"Yeah, you like that? Like when I'm mean to you? 

Keeping Eddie steady with one hand on his hip, he reaches up with the other to thumb at Eddie's nipples. They pebble under Richie's touch, and he takes a minute to flick them erect, ignoring Eddie's pained moans, as he pinches them between his fingers until they bloom red.

"I could do anything I wanted," Richie says, as he rubs roughly at Eddie's tits. "Get you on your hands and knees. Fuck you on the floor. Maybe just make you sit on my dick while I take my time, come in you as many times as I want. And not let you come. Or I could really rough you up." 

"Oh my god, ngh-"

Richie cracks his hand down on Eddie's ass, savouring the jiggle of it under his palm. Goes hot at the way Eddie stiffens and gasps.

"Did I say you could talk, Eddie?" he says, stroking his hand along the red mark he's bound to have left behind.

Eddie shakes his head, though he sticks out his ass like he wants to be spanked again.

"Start riding me now, sweetheart. Lift yourself and drop back down again. Take as much as you can."

Eddie does, shakily, his thighs quivering as he lifts himself a couple of inches and slides back down.

"That's right, princess," he grits, "just like that."

Eddie makes a desperate, mewling noise at the name, as he sets up a steady, slow rhythm on Richie's dick. As he spreads his thighs as far as he can and bouncing himself lightly on Richie's cock, taking a bit more inside him each time.

"God yeah," Richie says, leaning back against his pillows to watch him. "Use me like a dildo you've got stashed secretly at home. That you ride when your wife is out. Have you ever done that before, baby?"

Eddie shakes his head, but Richie can tell from the hot flush of blood to his cheeks that he's thought about it.

"You'd fucking love it. Would love to see you like that. Just fucking yourself on it every time you're alone." He reaches up to thumb at Eddie's mouth, pulling his bottom lip away from his teeth with a rough swipe. "God, baby, you were made for this, weren't you?"

And he was. His small, beautiful boy had been made to take cock.

Richie taps him on the face. "Ride me harder now, come on."

Eddie does as he's told: he starts riding him hard now, lifting more of himself and slamming back down, crying out every time Richie's cock presses up against that little spot inside him. He chases the feeling, resting his hands on Richie's chest as he sticks out his ass and fucking rides his dick fast. And Richie wishes more than anything he could see Eddie from behind, spin him around and watch his dick splitting his ass open like a fruit.

Richie rocks his hips up, getting his feet flat on the bed, with his hands under Eddie's ass, feeling drunk from the feel of Eddie around him, the sight of him pushing down on his dick, the sounds of their harsh, panting moans filling the room.

"Take the fucking bandage off," he says as Eddie bounces on his lap. "Want to see my bite."

He hadn't been planning to say it. But as soon as he does he wants it more than fucking anything.

Eddie does as he's told. He scrambles frantically at the bandage as Richie presses him down on his cock, peeling it off with desperate fingers. 

And there it is. A mark the size of a small peach, deep and red, bruised purple in the centre from the imprint of Richie's teeth. The violent intensity of it against Eddie's pale throat makes him shudder, makes him say, "Fuck yeah, that's my boy," as he fucks up hard into Eddie's tight ass.

And it's probably way too much - Eddie must be hurting, he didn't even prepare him properly - but Eddie moans like he fucking loves it.

Until it's not enough and Richie's sitting up in bed, curling Eddie's legs around his back as he thrusts up into Eddie's tight, narrow body.

The new position brings their faces together, lets Richie taste Eddie's hot breath as he slams up into him.

"What would they say, if they all knew?" Richie breathes. "If they knew you'd come in here in the middle of the night begging for my dick?"

"I- I don't know," Eddie says, sounding like a junkie strung out on cock.

"I know that they'd say. They'd say you were my whore."

"Ugh god-"

"Wouldn't they, baby?"

" _Yes_ ," Eddie gasps wetly. And then, "Richie, I-"

He stops what he's saying, shoving his face into the crook of Richie's shoulder, and he goes completely limp as Richie thrusts into him. Using him like his little sex doll that he's arranged on his lap. All sweet and simpering, and made to be fucked as hard as Richie wants.

"Tell me what you were going to say," Richie says, as he spreads Eddie's cheeks around the thick length of his cock.

"No," Eddie moans into his shoulder. 

That wouldn't do. Richie takes a handful of Eddie's hair and jerks his head back so he's forced to look at him.

"I said tell me right now."

Eddie goes a deep, scarlet red as he says, "I need it harder, Richie."

Oh Jesus. _Harder_.

"Oh yeah? What do you say then?"

"Please."

"Please what?"

"Please give me your big, fat fucking cock."

That's all he needs. 

Feeling a fire under his skin, Richie surges up, flattening Eddie to the bed beneath him. The movement pulls his dick out, and the whine Eddie makes at the sudden loss is both adorable and fucking hot. But Eddie isn't empty for long. Looming over him, one of Eddie's legs arched up in his hand, Richie grabs the head of his dick and presses it to Eddie's hole, is pushing fully inside before Eddie can even adjust.

"God, can't fucking get enough of your little virgin hole, baby," he says as Eddie shudders.

"ngh, Richie-"

"You've never had a man inside you before, have you?"

Eddie shakes his head, would look humiliated if it wasn't for the glassy, dicked-out look in his eyes.

"But you love it don't you, you're such a little fucking slut for it."

Eddie gasps, nodding. "Yes, Richie, _yes_."

"Put your legs over my shoulders," he says, and Eddie does.

In this position, Richie can take control. He fucks into him hard, kneeling up on the bed as he folds Eddie in half and spears him down onto his cock on every thrust, his balls smacking heavily against the juicy plumpness of Eddie's ass where they're full of come.

It feels so fucking god, Richie almost drools.

"This is what you need? Me making you take it?"

"Yes," Eddie cries, looking like he's about to sob.

"I've wanted my dick inside you since I knew I could do that," he says. "Used to fucking dream about you like this."

Richie leans back so he can Eddie's legs in his hands. He pushes them up and out, and fucks him as deep as he can. And all Eddie can do is take it, his back arching as he wails. The opposite of the man who so primly had said he was married the other night, scowling at Richie across the table. This little dick slut had been lurking inside him all the time. 

Watching Eddie come undone beneath him, Richie suddenly wants it all. He wants to throw Eddie around, fuck him from behind with an iron grip on his waist; wants to spread him across the bed and eat his sore little hole out, making him come just from the wet press of his tongue; wants to know how he'd look like with a dildo stretching him out as he gags on Richie's cock; how he'd look on his hands and knees, in Richie's house back in LA, serving him whenever he wanted it, like his little dick-hungry slave with clamps on his nipple and a bunny plug. Just there, his sweet, beautiful, brave boy, sticking out his tongue for Richie's come or presenting his little ass for Richie's dick, right there in the kitchen after he's had breakfast, or in his office, when he wants to take a break from writing, where his hole's still oozing Richie's come.

Richie grunts low as the images hit him. Combined with the image of Eddie under him, coming absolutely undone, he's at breaking point.

"Fuck, Eddie, I'm going to come. Is that what you want? Want me to come inside you, sweetheart?"

Eddie goes wild, clawing at the hair on his chest. "Yes, Richie, want it so bad, please."

"Yeah? You want Daddy's come?"

It's out of his mouth before he can stop it. And sure, maybe that name had come up before with past partners, but it had always been flirty, a throwaway line - _you like what you see, Daddy?_ \- while they'd been goofing around. Richie had never called himself that before, never seriously. 

But he shouldn't have worried. Because at that exact moment Eddie's body stiffens, and without even being touched, he comes.

He comes all over himself, splattering his belly and his chest with white, mouth open on a wail. 

"Oh sweetheart," he coos, watching Eddie absolutely lose it. "My sweet baby boy."

And Richie feels it build - from the clenching of Eddie's ass and sight of him as he comes completely untouched, to the heavy sound of his balls slapping Eddie's ass - he feels his stomach clench and he groans, "Gonna come, baby."

"Do it, Richie," Eddie whispers, where he's shivering, covered in his own come. "Come inside your boy." As he says it, his fingers come up to play with the bite at his throat - he does it absently, like he doesn't even know he's doing it - and that's what pushes him over the edge.

Richie thrusts into him, once, twice, and comes hard on the third one. He comes with his face pressed against Eddie's neck, shuddering as Eddie moans quietly. As he dumps his come, for the second time that day, into Eddie's ass. Thrusting his hips in small jerks to get all of it inside, as he makes a noise he's never heard from himself before. Something deep and guttural, that makes Eddie's spent dick twitch.

When he's finished, he kisses the skin at Eddie's chest, uses his teeth and his tongue to suck a small mark into Eddie's collarbone. 

He lifts his head to look at Eddie, the two of them panting. Eddie has gone boneless, his legs still wrapped around Richie loosely.

"You okay, sweetheart? Still with me?"

Eddie nods, panting heavily. His eyes are hooded, cheeks a deep pink. And he's gazing up at Richie with a soft, open expression. He reaches out to push Richie's glasses up, where they'd been slipping down his nose, and he gives Richie the sweetest, shyest smile. 

Richie can't help but smile back, feeling the grin stretch over his face. "What are you thinking?"

Eddie just presses his face against the bedspread. "Nuthin," he mumbles.

"Want to get cleaned up?" 

Eddie shakes his head, his head lolling against the bed sleepily.

"Okay, but I have to pull out now, all right?"

"No," Eddie moans, and god, how could he be this perfect? 

Richie ducks in for a small kiss. "I have to, baby." 

Eddie makes an unhappy noise as Richie pulls his soft dick out of his clenching, unwilling body.

"Needy baby," he chastises gently. He ducks his head to look at the drip of come leaking down Eddie's thighs. "Feel nice and full?"

Eddie nods, "Feels s'nice," he murmurs.

"Good. Come up here and lie against the pillows, you can't fall asleep like that."

He pulls Eddie up the bed, nestling him back against the pillows, before grabbing a tissue to wipe the come from the head of his dick. On top of the sheets, Eddie's on his side with his back to him, and the back of his thigh glistens with Richie's come. He'll be dripping it all night.

"Fuck," Richie murmurs, trying to be quiet, but it doesn't matter. Eddie's breathing has evened out, and he's a limp, warm bundle.

Richie collapses beside him, feeling boneless. He rests his hand on Eddie's hip, whispers, "I love you," as his vision blots black at the corners.

Richie wakes up to sunlight streaming through the window.

His head feels split open, and his mouth, when he yawns, tastes like a skunk died in it.

He looks around for his phone, finally finds it on the floor by his bed. The time reads 8:03am, which means he slept through most of the night. He still feels exhausted though, with a tiredness he hasn't felt since his party days, when it was normal for him to finish a show and do a speedball in the bathroom backstage. Nights like that - where he smoked, and drank, and fucked anything - he still felt hungover three days later.

Beside him, the sheets are unrumpled and cool to the touch. No sign of Eddie. He sits up fast. Was he okay? Did something happen to him? But no, it couldn't have. Bowers was dead, and Pennywise... Pennywise wouldn't be able to hurt anyone for a very long time. 

He stares at the sheets, wonders if Eddie had even slept or if he'd slinked back to his room as soon as Richie dozed off. Richie might have thought it was all a dream - the way Eddie had moved over him, as silky and as smooth as an ermine - except his dick throbs between his legs and there's a thick scent of come in the air. It was the smell you got after a particularly good fuck. 

And that's when he hears them - Bill and Eddie passing his room, in quiet conversation, as they probably make their way down for breakfast. With a sick feeling in his stomach he thinks, maybe the reason Eddie had gone back to his room was because he felt ashamed.

Richie dresses and packs quickly - not that he'd packed much in the first place - and suddenly can't wait to be out of this goddamn place. Derry. Maine. He never wanted to see this fucking place again. Doesn't even know if he could bear coming back to the East Coast. He only pauses when he starts to book a flight back to LA. He stares at the screen. Bangor to Los Angeles. One way. Then thinks of Eddie's face in the lamplight. How he had cried out for him. How he had gazed up at Richie like he was everything, the way he had touched the bite mark on his throat.

He shoves his phone in his pocket before he can press the buy button. 

It's only when he's leaving his room that he notices - the rose in the trash can has gone.

The others are already downstairs, sitting quietly around the breakfast table drinking orange juice and picking at a tray of cold toast. They don't look like people who'd just fought their childhood nemesis and survived. They look tired and pale, the opposite of the raucous group of friends who got drunk and arm wrestled at the Jade of the Orient two nights before.

Eddie's at the far end of the table next to Ben and his eyes flicker up when Richie walks in. He jumps slightly when their eyes meet and then winces, like the movement hurt him. Richie thinks about how hard he'd fucked him just a few hours before. He wonders if Eddie's had a bath yet or if his sore little hole is leaking his come while he's been buttering his toast. If it looks like his tiny rosebud's been ruined.

"Hey," he says, taking in his face. How beautiful he is. How breathtakingly alive.

"Hi," Eddie responds, fiddling with his spoon. He looks as tired as the others, but there's a little more colour in his face this morning. Not like the delicious, high blotch of dark pink that stained his face when he came on Richie's cock, but it was something.

Bill makes an abrupt noise, cutting through the air between them.

"If you sit with us, I'm leaving the room," he says, the grip on his coffee cup bone-tight.

"Bill," Bev says, with a quiet reprimand in her voice. "Let's not do this now. We're all exhausted. Can we just not?"

"I've said what I have to say. He can stay but I'm leaving."

"It's cool," Richie says. "I just wanted to come down and say I'm leaving this morning. So you don't have to put up with me for much longer."

Eddie's head shoots up from where he'd been staring at his plate. "What? You're going?"

"Yeah, there's a flight back to LA at one. I can catch it if I leave in the next hour."

"You're just... going to go? Now?"

"Is there something for me to stay for? I think everyone's made themselves pretty clear how they feel."

Ben looks uncomfortable. "Richie..."

"It's fine, whatever. I just wanted to let you all know."

Eddie stares at him for a second and then says, "Will you drive me to the airport?"

Richie blinks at him. That was the last thing he'd been expecting.

"I mean, I," Eddie glances around at the others, who are all staring at him across the table. "I don't have a car so... it would be great if you could. My flight isn't until this evening but I don't really think I want to stick around for much longer either. And I can work while I'm at the airport."

"I thought you wanted to go and see the old house?" Bev asks. 

"I don't know. Not now."

"I don't think this is a good idea," Bill says.

"It's my choice, Bill, I want to."

Bill grimaces. Doesn't even look at Richie as he says, "You want to be alone with him again?"

 _Him_ , like he was some fucking thing.

"It's really okay. If he's going to the airport too, it makes sense."

Bill reaches across the table to brush his knuckles along the back of Eddie's hand and Richie feels a flare of anger so hot it burns in his belly.

 _You don't get to touch him, motherfucker,_ he thinks viciously. _Don't you remember? Don't you remember how I made him mine? Why don't you look at his neck for a reminder._ Imagines himself charging over there, ripping the fresh bandage from Eddie's neck and pushing the red, hot, lurid bite into Bill's face, saying, _Is this enough for you, fuckface? Or do I need to cut my name into his skin to convince you?_

Richie tries his best to swallow down the anger, says, "I'm going in an hour. You're welcome to come with me if you want."

"I do, thanks," Eddie says, before looking back at his toast.

"Hey, by the way, did you take that rose from my room?"

Eddie blinks at him. "What rose?"

Back in his room, Richie's throwing back four aspirin when he hears a small knock on his open door.

It's Ben, who hovers in the doorway with a nervous smile.

"Come to give me a beating? You can if you want but I'm so hungover I'll probably vomit on you."

Ben gives a little laugh. "It's not that. I just wanted to talk to you quickly before you left."

"You can talk, if you don't mind me packing up while I do."

"Sure," Ben says, as he makes his way slowly into the room. "Look, Richie, I don't want to leave things between us like this."

Richie shrugs at him, throwing a smile over his shoulder as he shoves the last things into his bag.

"No hard feelings, really. I just think it's better if I head off."

"I just... I just wanted to say thank you, for getting Eddie out of there."

And somehow hearing that felt worse than Bill punching him in the face. 

"Thanks, man," Richie says, trying to keep his voice even. "That means a lot, but you don't have to. I know how everyone feels."

But Ben looks at him with that soft, understanding expression he'd always had as a kid.

"I just know if it had been Bev instead... I don't know what I would have done. You did what you did to protect him."

He pats Richie on the shoulder, a sad smile on his face. "I'm just saying, what I'm trying to say is, I understand."

But Richie doesn't think he can ever understand. Ben had always been soft with Beverly. Had written her poems and looked at her like she'd just walked out of the sun. He was reverent and radiant around her. There wasn't anything soft about the way Richie had felt about Eddie.

Ben leaves him with a small hug, and a promise to look him up when he was next in LA. Richie agrees, but knows he won't.

Once Eddie is ready and has brought down all six of his bags, they all group around outside to say goodbye.

Eddie is at the centre of it, as they cluster around and pull him into a series of fierce, lingering hugs. It takes long enough for Richie to light a cigarette, smoking it as he leans back against the car and watches.

Bev cries as she hugs him. So does Ben. Mike doesn't cry, but he does rest his forehead against Eddie's, whispers something to him that Richie can't catch. Bill is last - of course - and the hug they share feels tentative. Loaded with some meaning that makes Richie grit his teeth.

"I'm sorry," Bill says, as he draws his hand to the nape of Eddie's neck, brushing against the short hairs there.

"Don't say that, please," Eddie says into Bill's shoulder, drawing his hands around Bill's shoulders. 

"But the things I said, about when we were kids." Bill's voice cuts off as Eddie tightens his arms around him.

"You were just a boy, Bill, and you'd lost Georgie. It's really okay. I don't blame you."

For a moment, they become children again, with Richie waiting anxiously on the sidelines as Bill and Eddie hug goodbye. Eddie always had a tendency to cling to Bill a little too long when they hugged, pushing his face into Bill's chest as Bill laughed and ruffled his hair. Watching it had made Richie sick, jealousy as hot and sharp as a knife slicing through him, and watching it now does the same.

"Eddie," he calls, as he flicks his cigarette away. "We have to go."

Bill shoots him a look, but pulls away. "Call us when you get home, okay?" he says, his hand on Eddie's forearm. 

"I will," Eddie says, with one last smile at him. "I'll call you."

After that they hug Richie too, but they feel stiff, noncommittal, quick to draw away. Everyone except Bill, who gives him a small nod instead, his face stony. Richie thinks about how much he'd love to sock him in the mouth.

"So the Losers Club is adjourned," he says. He gives them all a little salute as he walks back to the car, trying not to look too closely at the way Bev's bottom lip wobbles. How sad Ben's eyes look. Trying to ignore the feeling of something snapping between them forever.

"I hope you get out of here and find some good pussy," Richie says to Mike as he's getting in the car.

That pulls a quick, surprised laugh out of Mike. "Thanks Rich, I'll try my best," he says, the shadow of an exasperated smile on his face.

"We're going to see you soon, don't you dare ignore my phone calls," Bev says to Eddie, her face dewy with tears.

"I won't," Eddie says, one foot in the car. "I promise."

They drive away from the Town House. Richie doesn't look back, but Eddie does, turning to wave at the others. He hears something catch in Eddie's throat and he glances at him, expecting to see tears. But Eddie has turned his face to look out the window, shielding his face. 

"You okay?"

Eddie nods stiffly, clenching his arms around his travel bag. 

They sit in silence for a few minutes, Eddie staring out the window, until Richie can't take it anymore.

"Do you want to talk about last night?"

"No."

"I think we should. Did I hurt you? I know I was pretty rough." He glances over in time to see Eddie's ears turn red. "I should've taken more care with you. Especially with it being your first time. You should have stayed in bed with me. I could have looked after you, baby." 

"I just said I don't want to talk about it."

"Eddie-"

"Richie," Eddie snaps, "can you please just respect what I'm saying? I said I don't want to fucking talk about it."

Richie bites down on his tongue before he can shout. Resists the urge to pull over so he can make Eddie talk to him. Not do this avoidant shit he's done his entire life when he feels threatened. Piling on the armour as soon as he feels just the tiniest bit vulnerable. 

"Christ, fine," he mutters. "Have it your way."

The conversation ends abruptly, as the streets of Derry start to unwind into the countryside on the edges of town. Looking at the fields, and the trees whipping by outside Richie feels something prickle at him. A nagging little thing he'd wanted to do the moment he set foot back in Derry. 

He knows he can't leave until he does it, that he'll never have another chance.

"Hey, can we make a detour quickly? You have time?"

He feels Eddie looking at him in his periphery. "What is it?"

"It won't take long, I promise. I just want to check something out one last time before we leave."

Eddie's silent for a moment. Finally he says. "If you're going to try to take me to Taco Bell, you can forget it."

Richie feels a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "It's not that, I promise."

After a moment, Eddie says, "Sure, okay."

Richie drives them south, along the edges of town, by the fields and the cowsheds, past the house where Bill and Richie once set off firecrackers and ran screaming when the old man came out and yelled blue murder at them. That man would be long dead by now, like so much of their childhood in Derry.

Before too long they arrive, down a side road, along the border of the woods. It feels the same as it always did, even 27 years later.

The kissing bridge.

Richie sees it's heavily overgrown now, its wood damaged and decaying. It had been a ritualistic place for everyone who grew up in Derry. _Carve your love's initials into the wood_ , the old-timers said, _and their heart will beat for you forever_. 

He parks up by the side of the road and looks at Eddie. "Do you remember this? The kissing bridge?"

Eddie looks at him confused. "Yeah... but what are we doing here?"

"There's something I need to do, it won't take long," he says as he opens the door.

And it doesn't. Their initials are exactly where he remembered. Stooped down low. At a kid's height. They're faded now, but still burning brightly among all the signatures and scrawls. The R and the E encased by a messy heart. 

Richie runs his fingers along them. They're faded but still legible. Touching it brings him back to the afternoon he carved them. A few days after Eddie had broken his arm. He had slipped out here first thing in the morning, making sure no one was around, before fiercely carving their initials into the wood, repeating, like a mantra, the following thought: _Eddie, be mine._

He kneels there, feeling all of 13 again - when his entire body would tremor just from the thought of Eddie: how his cheeks would heat, how clumsy he'd be; how he'd make any stupid fucking joke for the chance of making Eddie laugh. It only worked half the time, but when it did - Eddie flashing those dimples at him, his eyes the shape of almonds from how wide he was grinning - Richie thought he might die of happiness. 

He hears the car door open and shut. The crunch of Eddie's footsteps on the road. And then, the sharp little inhale when Eddie sees the initials.

"When did you do that?" he finally asks, voice quiet despite the silence around them.

"When we were kids," Richie murmurs, as he runs his finger along the E. "That summer. I made a promise that I'd do anything to protect you."

Eddie makes a noise in the back of his throat. "You loved me then?"

"I don't think I've ever loved anyone else," Richie says, feeling the weight of the confession settle into his bones.

"Richie..."

Under the weight of Eddie's eyes, Richie gets the penknife from his pocket and begins to carve the initials afresh.

"How did you know?" Eddie asks as Richie gets to work. "That you felt that way about me?"

"I just did, I didn't question it."

"Well when did you know?"

"Eddie, I knew the moment I met you. That first day in the playground when Sonia dropped you off. You just stood there crying in the hallway, you wouldn't come into the classroom no matter how nice Miss Beech was. Until I came out and took your hand. You stopped crying immediately, and you looked up at me with these huge brown eyes. I don't know, I just felt it hit me. I left school that day and I was in love with you."

"Richie, how can that be true? We were five years old."

"It doesn't matter. That feeling never went away."

Eddie doesn't speak again until Richie's finished, rubbing his thumb over the initials with his thumb. He thinks Eddie might have wandered back to the car, but when he looks around he's still standing there, staring at Richie with a devastated expression.

"Eddie, what is it?"

And Eddie looks like he's on the cusp of saying something, his face soft and open, but he just shakes his head.

"We should go," is all he says. "We'll be late."

Richie looks back at the initials one last time, stroking his fingertips along the fresh engraving. "You did good," he whispers, to the ghost of the boy who first made the carving 27 years before, sneaking out of the house at first light to do it. "You did the best you could."

Back in the car, he finds Eddie trembling in the passenger seat.

"Hey, what is it?"

 _What do you think it is, you moron? He was kidnapped and almost killed yesterday._ _Got any other genius questions?_

"You know you don't need to go to the airport, right? We could head back, you could get some rest. Or we could-"

"I lied," Eddie blurts.

Richie feels something thud in the bottom of his stomach. "What do you mean?"

Eddie turns to face him, and his eyes are wide and frightened. 

"I do remember what happened. With Pennywise. What he made me do." Eddie's bottom lip trembles for a moment. "The things you said."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"I couldn't, okay? I couldn't have the others looking at me and asking me all about it. It was humiliating."

But if Eddie remembered everything that happened in the sewers, that also meant he remembered-

Oh _fuck._

Richie manages to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth to say, "Oh."

Eddie's brows draw in. "Is that all you have to say?"

"What do you want me to say?"

Eddie makes an annoyed noise. "Did you mean it?"

_No, are you kidding? What, that I spent my entire childhood obsessed with you? That I wanted you to be mine, like I could just pick you up and take you home like you were a doll? That I jerked off all the time thinking about you tied up in my bed? That I loved you so much sometimes I thought about kidnapping you? Because that was fucking better than having to see you cuddle up to Bill one more time? Eds, of course not. Don't be dumb._

"Yeah," Richie croaks. "Yeah, I meant it."

"All of it? The things about watching me, wanting me? You wanted me... like that?"

"Yeah. All of it was true."

They sit there in silence for a few minutes. Richie stares at the steering wheel, trying to ignore what's swelling between them. He knows he should stop this. Turn on the radio, drive them to the airport, but he can't help but ask, "So you remember everything? What happened with Pennywise."

Eddie stares at his hands. "Yeah." 

"Did he hurt you? I mean, beyond the enchantment?"

"I don't think so. I just remember Bowers taking me down there, how scared I was without you or Bill. And he-" Eddie swallows. "He was there, down in the pit waiting for me. The way he laughed when he saw me, I realised I'd never forgotten it, it was always there in my dreams... that shriek."

Yeah, Richie doesn't think he'd ever forgotten that either. The laugh that had tied his guys into knots. Even now, seeing a clown made him stop in the street. Had made him cross the road. Once at a friend's party for his daughter, the clown entertainer had made Richie so agitated he'd left in the middle of cutting the cake. Had gone straight to the nearest bodega for a six pack and drank each one in the driver's seat.

Eddie shudders. "And when he put that spell on me, it was like... I don't know. I could sense everything, I could see and hear, but I couldn't do anything about it. It was like I was sleeping but I was still awake. And then everything went black... until I woke up by the lake."

_Woke up to me coming inside you._

"So you understand. Why I did what I did?"

Eddie looks at him. "The Sleeping Beauty story."

Richie nods. "I had no choice. A few more minutes and you could have... there wasn't any time."

Bev's voice rings in his head. _Why was it up to you?_

"You were the first thing I saw when I woke up. I remember slipping in his arms. I felt so tired... I felt like I was underwater, but the water was black and it pushed me down. I didn't want to. But then I was being pulled out. You pulled me out."

As he listens to Eddie, something pokes at him. A feeling. A question. He thinks of the way Eddie had sneaked to his room. How jittery he'd been when he knocked on his door. Then later, waking up to Eddie touching him, how out of it he'd looked.

"Why did you come to my room last night?"

Eddie gives a helpless little shrug. "I don't know. I woke up and I was so scared. I thought I was still there, in the sewers."

"Ah shit, baby... You're not. You're here with me, okay?" He cups a hand around Eddie's neck, stroking his fingers through his hair.

"And I just knew I needed to be with you."

Eddie says it quietly but it makes his heart trip all the same. As do Eddie's scared eyes when he looks up at him.

"Is that wrong? What I did last night?"

"No, it was fucking hot."

And it was. The hottest fucking thing of Richie's whole life.

Eddie bites his lip shyly, and Richie can't help but zone in on the skin of his lip being sucked between his teeth. How it goes from pink to white.

"I liked it too." 

And Richie knows he did. Knows from the way he pawed at Richie, how clumsily he jerked him off, how he tried to get him inside. So desperate for it, it had made his face pinch. Then how he bounced himself in Richie's lap so eagerly, like he'd been made for it. The memory makes his skin hot, makes him want it again, right now, to be pushing into that tight little space between his legs. 

"Oh yeah?" he asks, voice cracking. 

Eddie nods. And something happens to his face. He starts to get that same glazed, doped-out expression he had the night before. When he sucked on Richie's cock like it was a candy cane. When he talks again, his voice has dipped, like it's steeped in honey, like it's been caramelised. 

"I keep trying to think about what Pennywise did. The things he made me do," he says slowly. "And I know I should be horrified but..."

"What?"

"But when I try to, all I think about is you. Waking up on the side of the lake, your cock inside me. How it felt when you came inside me."

Eddie's words zap through him, harden his dick instantly. God, he wants that pouty little mouth on his cock again.

"Eddie..."

"Do you remember that game we had when we were kids? When we played Knights and Princes?"

Richie blinks at the shift in conversation. "Yeah, of course."

How could he forget. Sometimes he thinks it's the thing that had sparked all of this: his obsession with owning Eddie. He remembers the sight of him on the floor, his wrists and feet tied with a length of twine from Bill's garage. The way he couldn't move, or get up, even if he wanted to. The shock of seeing him lying at their feet, bound, as he stared up at them with wide eyes. It would be Stan who'd carry him away, finding somewhere in the house or out the back to hide him. Leaving Bill and Richie to compete to see who'd find him first. The knight who'd rescue the prince.

"I'd always get stuck playing the prince because I was the smallest," Eddie says, his voice fey, eyes fixed beyond Richie's shoulder.

"That's what you get for being the size of a pixie."

"And each time it was Bill who found me."

Richie snorts. "Yeah, that fucker had some sixth sense where you were."

Eddie's gaze slips to his face again, his eyes hooded. "I always wondered what you'd do if you found me instead."

Richie's about to quip, to flick some joke off the tip of his tongue, but he can't. Because Eddie starts to unbutton his shirt. 

"Eddie? What are you doing?"

"Do you want to see what you did to me?" Eddie asks.

Richie's dick throbs. Eddie was asking him _what_?

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"Don't you want to see what you did to me, Richie? See how much you hurt me?"

Richie wrenches his eyes away to stare at the wheel. Drums his fingers there to ground himself. Anything but look at Eddie. Tries instead to focus instead on what Bev had said to him at the Town House yesterday.

_There's one word for how you feel about Eddie: obsession._

He should stop this. Drive them back to the Town House. Make Eddie sleep. He was exhausted and disoriented, probably still in shock. He should bring him back and slip out while he's sleeping. Do the right thing. Except, something inside him opens its jaws. He doesn't want to. 

"Richie, look at me," Eddie whines.

"I said no, Eddie."

"But I'll die if you don't look at me, _please._ "

And, fuck, Richie has never been able to resist that voice. He looks, half expecting to see Eddie's eyes lit up with molten gold again, like they had been in the sewers. What if he was right? What if he was still under the enchantment? Would Eddie be acting this way if he wasn't?

But his eyes were still that same deep brown. So wide and fringed in dark lashes, as he stares at Richie.

All his worries fizzle away when Eddie reaches the last button and pushes the shirt aside to bare his thin, milky chest to Richie.

His chest is perfectly smooth and white, apart from two candy-pink nipples. And Richie's mouth floods with spit as he takes all of Eddie in: the smudges of bruise on his torso where Richie had slammed him down onto his cock, the bruising at his nipples where Richie had flicked them with fingers.

But it's when Eddie reaches up to peel away the bandage that Richie feels like he might die, because there it is: the harsh red bite at the base of his throat, the one where he could see the perfect imprint of his teeth, where he'd hunkered his body over Eddie's and sunk his teeth into him.

Richie can't help himself. He reaches out and runs his hand down the span of Eddie's chest. 

"See what you did?" Eddie asks again. 

"Yeah," Richie husks. 

"I have scratches on my back too, where you pressed me into the ground."

And he had been harsh with Eddie, hadn't he? Had pressed against him so hard as he rutted into him.

"They hurt, I can feel them now."

" _Fuck_ , Eddie-"

Eddie's almost panting now. His eyes are wide and dark. "From where you fucked me while I was sleeping."

Richie takes him in. How gorgeous he looks. How desperate. And the hunger inside him licks its jowls. 

"But it's what I deserved, right?" He spreads his hand out between his nipples, feeling the thump of his heart. "What I deserved for saving you."

Eddie shivers. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth again and nods.

"I thought so. That's what you get for teasing me with that juicy little ass for so long. Flashing me those big eyes. I got you out of there. Your body's my prize." He looks into Eddie's eyes as he says, "Tell me you understand."

"I understand, Richie," Eddie says.

He rubs his thumb across Eddie's right nipple, watches his mouth fall open as it hardens under his touch. Without warning he flicks it. Once, twice. three times. Thinks he could get drunk off the feeling of watching Eddie flinch, how easily he falls apart under him. 

"I could clamp these girly tits of yours, you know," he says, and Eddie twitches hard. 

"Oh my god," he moans.

"Clamp them, really make you feel it. They'd be sore for days."

Eddie's eyes flutter closed as he moans. He looks like such a needy mass, his shirt hanging off his arms, nipples hard as he pushes against Richie's hands. Eyes glazed. If anyone drove by, they'd see Eddie acting like a total slut, looking like he was drugged on Richie's touch.

The thought makes Richie so hard he fucking aches. The idea of Eddie being his: to touch, to please, to hurt. Fucking everything.

He takes his time alternating between Eddie's nipples, flicking one then the other until they're stiff and sore. Until Eddie's actually keening, his jeans straining as he bucks his crotch off the seat. He's hard in his jeans, little dick eager for attention. He's on the verge of begging.

Richie ignores him, taking his hand back to lick his thumb, before rubbing the wet pad over Eddie's nipple. 

The touch makes Eddie whine. " _Richie_ ," he says, his back arching.

"What is it?"

God, and he could get fucking addicted to the way Eddie says his name like this.

"I-" he cuts off on a moan as Richie rakes his fingernail down the delicate pink of his nipple. "1 want it again."

Richie's hand stills. "You what?"

"I need you. _Please_."

Richie's trying to think of a way to respond - hard when his brain has short-circuited -when Eddie takes Richie's hand and brings it up to his throat. 

_Oh fuck,_ he thinks, as Eddie's eyes go hazier, as he moans drunkenly at the feeling of Richie's hand around his neck.

And Richie can't help it. Can't help the way he instinctively curls his hand around the fragile stem of Eddie's throat, how he tightens his grip, until he feels Eddie's pulse beat against his fingers. Until Eddie can't even moan. Can't help the feeling of power he has, in this beaten-up car on an old bridge in Derry, with Eddie Kaspbrak's life in his hands. His cock is so hard he hurts, he can feel his heartbeat in every throb.

"Tell me what you want," Richie says quietly.

"Want you to be the one who wins me," Eddie says. 

"Win you?"

"Yeah, I... I always wanted it to be you."

Something snaps. The fractured wall. The shaky dam. Richie clutches a fistful of hair at the base of Eddie's skull and wrenches him across the seat. Eddie makes a frightened noise as he's pulled across the gap, but it's soon swallowed by the hungry swallow of Richie's mouth.

They kiss savagely, and Richie realises that in the midst of their frantic fucking the night before, they hadn't found time to kiss.

He makes up for it now, forcing his tongue between Eddie's lips, a hand pulling Eddie's hair back so he can kiss him any way he wants. Which is like this, his throat arched up, vulnerable, as Richie kisses him hard, biting down hard on Eddie's bottom lip as he keens.

"You know how I carved our initials into the bridge?" he asks, breath harsh against Eddie's lips. "It's because I wanted you to belong to me. And you do, don't you? You were mine the second we met. But what I really wanted was to carve it into your skin. So you could never get rid of me."

"Oh my god, Richie, oh my god," Eddie pants, fingers digging into the collar of his shirt.

They end up fucking in the backseat.

It's something Richie hasn't done in years, not since he was a teenager and he'd park with girls from school, thinking of Eddie the entire time he sunk into them. But he can't wait, not when he has Eddie spread out under him on the backseat, not when Richie's pulled down his jeans and underwear to look at that tantalising peach butt, the one he leans in to bite on its plumpest part as Eddie gasps.

It's way too cramped - making Richie kick open the back door so they have more room - and he's pretty sure he's going to get a bump on his head from how much he knocks it against the ceiling. But he doesn't care. Because when he parts Eddie's cheeks and sees how wet and messy his hole is from Richie's come, how fucking sore he looks from getting fucked, all thoughts evaporate. And before he's even asked Eddie if he's ready, he's taking his dick in his hand, and pushing into Eddie's sloppy mess, so slick and open it's like fucking a pussy.

They fuck like that, like eager teens, crashing into each other. Richie's hardly pulled out before he's punching inside again, rutting against Eddie so fast all Eddie can do is lie there and take it, gasping softly into the seats of the car, pushing himself back onto Richie's dick.

"Imagine if someone caught us like this," Richie laughs against the back of Eddie's neck. "If they looked in and took pictures."

"Richie, no!" Eddie gasps, but it doesn't stop him from sticking his ass out for Richie's cock.

"I can just imagine what they'd say," Richie says, as he licks up the sweat at Eddie's hairline. "Famous comedian Richie Tozier spotted in the-ass-end-of-nowhere-Maine days after abandoning his Chicago show, fucking his new boy toy on the side of the road."

"Do you - _ngh, right there, Rich_ \- do you always talk about yourself in the third person when you're fucking? It's not hot."

"Oh yeah? I'll show you not hot," Richie says, before he presses the head of his dick right up against Eddie's prostate, making him thrash.

They don't last long. Not with Eddie's butt smacking off Richie's hips every second. With how they're curled together, as the windows in the car start to steam up. On one thrust, Richie's hand curls around Eddie's neck, and he pushes away Eddie's bandage to press his fingers up against the mark.

Like pressing a button, Eddie's body does taut like a rabbit caught in a wire trap, and he comes. He comes on a dirty whine, rubbing his dick up against the leather seats as he spurts over them. And the thought of dumping a third load into Eddie, right into that sore, gaping hole, has Richie trembling violently. Has him biting down on Eddie's neck, growling in the back of his throat, as he comes right inside the mess of his boy's body.

Afterwards, as they pant heavily, Richie takes a handful of Eddie's hair and twists his head around so they can kiss. It's a filthy kiss, as sloppy and wet as the way they just fucked, and Eddie opens his mouth wide as Richie's drool pools between them. 

Richie finally pulls away, laughing a little at the glazed expression on Eddie's face.

"Good boy," Richie says teasingly, as he drags his fingers through the spit on Eddie's chin. "What do you say?"

He's expecting a sweet little _thank you_ or even for Eddie's sassy side to come out to tell Richie to get off him. What he doesn't expect is the way Eddie leans into him for another soft kiss and to whisper, "I love you," against Richie's lips.

Richie freezes and pulls back. "What did you say?"

Eddie goes still beneath him. "Nothing. I didn't say anything."

"But you-"

"Richie, you're crushing me," Eddie says, squirming under the hard press of Richie's body.

"Shit, sorry, just a sec."

He pulls out, making them both hiss, and he can't help but look down at Eddie's hole, how it clenches greedily, trying so hard to keep him inside.

He falls back against the seats, pulling up his jeans and feeling shell-shocked. Eddie sits up too, looking anywhere but at Richie.

"Do you have anything, like a tissue for, erm," he gestures vaguely between his legs, his cheeks going red.

The sight of him makes Richie's breath stop - Eddie with his spread legs, dripping come onto the backseat. He looks like a filthy still from a gay porno, made even sweeter by Eddie's flushed cheeks, how he still has his sneakers on. Like some debauched virgin learning how to take cock.

"Richie?"

Richie breaks out of his smutty reverie and climbs awkwardly into the front seat so he can grab a wad of McDonalds serviettes from the dash.

"This is all I have, I'm sorry," he says, as he turns around with them.

"It's okay," Eddie says quietly, reaching down to dab delicately between his legs.

"Don't look at me like that," he says when he notices Richie watching.

"I can't help it. You're so fucking gorgeous."

"No, I'm not."

"You are. You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

Eddie doesn't meet his eyes. "I think it was easier when you were talking about fucking my mom all the time," he says, pulling up his jeans.

"Well now I've fucked both her and her son, and all I can say is, she could learn a few things from you."

He's hoping for a laugh, even an exasperated eye roll. But Eddie just looks pained. "Richie, don't."

Eddie climbs back into the front seat, his shirt wrinkled, hair a mess. He looks like he's been completely dishevelled. The complete opposite of the man who'd walked into the Jade of the Orient a few days before, complaining of his gluten allergy and weakness to cashews. 

He brushes his fingers against the bite on his throat, where Richie had scratched his fingers against it.

"Is it bleeding?" he asks Richie.

Richie tries not to let his tongue hang out of his mouth as he says, "No, you're good."

Eddie doesn't say anything else as he buttons up his shirt again, hiding the mark from view.

"You okay?" he asks, brushing Eddie's hair behind his ear.

"I'm fine, but we should go. We spent too much time here."

"Wait... you still want to go to the airport?"

"We both have flights, don't we?"

Richie stares at him, feeling like he's missing something.

"Eddie, come on, you're not getting on that plane."

"Yes, I am. I told you what time my gate opens."

Eddie says it like Richie hadn't just fucked him in the back of his car. Like they hadn't fucked three times in the last 18 hours.

"You're dripping three loads of my come and you're going to get on a plane?"

"Please don't say that," Eddie whines, eyes clenching shut. Like if he closes his eyes it'll all go away.

But Richie can't. "You're going to get home and see your wife, with your ass full of my come and my bite mark on your throat."

"Richie, I said shut up! Please, just stop talking for once. All you do is talk."

"Yeah, and you don't say enough."

Eddie doesn't say anything to that, rummaging through his bag for his hand cream. 

And Richie thinks, this might be it, he might never see Eddie again. And he can't do that, not now. Can't go back to his old life when he knows who Eddie is now. When he's been inside of him, knows how sweet he tastes. How he looks when he sleeps next to him.

"Come to LA with me," he says.

Eddie's hands still. He looks at Richie. "What?"

"Yeah," he says, trying to keep his voice steady. "Come back to LA with me."

Eddie just stares at him like he's gone mad. And maybe he has. But he thinks if he has to go a day without being inside Eddie again he might die.

"You heard me down in the sewers, right? I'm in love with you, Eddie. I'm a fucking dog for you, okay?"

"Richie..."

"Do you want me to beg, is that it?"

"No, I don't want you to beg," Eddie says, sounding desperate. "I just want to get my flight. Please let me get my flight."

But Richie can't. "I'll give you anything you want. Literally anything. I'll make you so happy."

"Richie, I'm married..."

"I don't care. I'll pay for everything. The divorce. Moving you out to LA, everything."

"But we don't- we don't fit into each other's lives. You're famous. I have a job in New York, I can't just leave it."

"I don't care. I'll make it fit. I'll do anything you want. We don't even have to live in LA, I'll go anywhere with you. Just don't do this."

And now Richie's the one who sounds desperate, as he swivels in his seat to take Eddie by the hands. But he doesn't care.

"Not to mention, we would literally kill each other," Eddie says, trying to pull away. "We fight about everything!"

Richie just tightens his grip, pulls Eddie closer.

"I'll let you win every fight, Eddie, every single one. I'd give anything to be able to fight with you every day."

But Eddie, the determined, stubborn thing he always is, presses on.

"We don't even know each other, Richie. We've known each other for two days after not seeing each other for 22 years."

"It doesn't matter, okay? I know you." He presses his hand to Eddie's chest, spreading his fingers over the patch of skin above his heart, as Eddie's breath hiccups. "I know you, Eddie. Better than anyone. And you know me. The years we spent apart make no difference."

Eddie shakes his head again. "You're crazy," he says softly.

"Why?"

"Because you're asking me to give up my entire life for you, Richie!"

"Do you love me?"

Eddie's mouth snaps shut. And he makes that pouty face, the one he always did when he didn't want to talk about something.

"Come on," Richie says, his voice harsh. "You said it just now. You can say it again. Or was it a lie?"

Eddie stares down at his hands. Picks at a nail for a second before saying, "It wasn't a lie."

"I can't hear you, Eddie."

Eddie's head snaps up and he glares at Richie hotly. "It wasn't a lie. I meant what I said."

"Then say it. You must at least have the courage to say that."

Eddie looks like he's about to tell him to fuck off. Instead he says, "I love you, okay? Happy now? I've loved you since I first saw you on TV. When you did that first SNL performance. Thanks for making me relive that by the way, you were terrible."

For a moment, Richie can't find words - it's the first time in his life he's ever been struck speechless. That had been 12 years ago.

"Is that really true?"

"Yeah. And I didn't understand it because you weren't even funny. You were an annoying asshole, and I was sitting there at home on my couch and I felt myself fall in love with you as I watched you goof around on TV. Do you know what that's like?"

Richie thinks of all the years he spent wanting. Searching for a man he didn't know, the grown-up version of the boy he always saw in his dreams. Saw the string of relationships that never lasted. Because the people could never compare to the man in Richie's head. The one who didn't exist.

"I know what it's like, Eddie. I've dreamed of you every single night since we left Derry. Every night for 20 years. I thought I was going mad. You were so vivid. And I tried desperately to remember who you were and I couldn't. So yeah, maybe I do get it."

"It doesn't matter," Eddie says, though his entire body quivers.

But something else prickles at Richie. "What else were you going to say to me?"

"When?"

"Last night, and just now on the bridge. You were going to say something to me. Tell me."

Eddie doesn't say anything.

"Look, if you're going to just leave, have the decency to tell me what you were going to say."

That aching, desperate expression comes back as Eddie stares at him for a moment before saying, "I was going to tell you that I loved you before too, when we were kids. You always thought it was Bill but it wasn't. It was always you."

Richie feels like he's been punched in the face again. Feels his entire world shift on its axis.

"But down in the sewers you said you loved Bill."

"I did love Bill. But then my feelings changed. And I fell in love with you. And I realised I only ever loved Bill like a brother."

"Why didn't you ever say anything to me?"

Eddie laughs, but it's an anguished sound. "What was I supposed to say? Walk up to my best friend and tell him I'm in love with him? When we were living in Derry, the homophobic epicentre of the east coast? In 1989? When I was 12-years-old and hated myself for it? How could I."

"When did you know?"

"I think it was always there. But I knew, I really knew, that day in Neibolt when you threw yourself in front of Pennywise. And I didn't even want to be in love with you, you were so stupid. You were stupid and antagonising and you told the worst jokes, and yet you were all I could think about."

Eddie's voice thickens with tears.

"And he- that fuck used it against me. Down in the sewers. He knew how I felt about you and he turned it into something sick, something twisted. And he made me admit all those things in front of you, the things I wanted... he made me feel like a _freak_."

Richie reaches over, cupping Eddie cheeks in his hands. "That wasn't your fault, okay? None of this is."

Eddie lets himself cry quietly for a couple of minutes, leaning into Richie's touch as Richie rubs his tears away with his thumbs. Letting the trauma of the past few days ebb out. But then he's drawing away, stiffening up again as he wipes his tears on the back of his hand.

"But I can't do this," he says. "So I'm going to get my flight and I'm going to go home."

Richie can't help the exasperated groan. "Eddie, we love each other, you just admitted to being in love with me, and you're going to leave?"

"It's for the best, okay? I really think it's for the best."

Eddie jumps when Richie slams his hands down on the steering wheel.

"How is that for the best? How _the fuck_ is that for the best? Why are you so scared of this?"

"And you're not? All of this frightens me, Richie. This-" he waves his hand between them. "It doesn't scare you?"

"No, Eddie, it feels right."

Eddie looks at him, distraught, before suddenly swerving around to grapple with the door handle.

"Fine, if you're not going to drive me to the airport, I'll get the bus then. You can do what you want."

And Richie thinks this really is it - Eddie's going to leave, and he's never going to speak to him or see him again. 

The little voice in the back of Richie's head says, _Remember._

And a second later, Richie does.

_Which one of you will claim him?_

He remembers Eddie down in the sewers, his tongue unlocked, running his hands down his body.

_I dreamed of a big, strong man who could look after me. Who could kiss me. Fuck me. Use me._

He thinks of Eddie as a child, turning the pages in his book of fairytales, imagining his prince coming to take him away.

Richie locks the car door before Eddie can open it. Eddie struggles with it for a second before he realises what Richie's done.

"Richie, let me out," Eddie says calmly, pressing his hands to the car door.

But Richie doesn't unlock the door. Instead he says, "I could force you, you know."

Eddie freezes. Doesn't say anything for a second. "What?"

Richie licks his bottom lip. "I could force you. Take you to the nearest motel and fuck you again. Not let you leave. I'm bigger than you. Stronger too. It wouldn't be that hard for me. And I think you'll be quiet if I tell you to be."

Eddie makes a small whimpering sound. It's tiny, but Richie still hears it.

"I could kidnap you. Empty my bank accounts. Take you out of the country. Have you hanging off my dick whenever I wanted it."

Eddie starts to shiver, but he doesn't interrupt, so Richie continues.

"Your wife will wonder where you are, but she'll never know. Or maybe she will. Maybe I could take pictures of you sucking my dick, maybe a video of me fucking you, and we could send it to her. See what she'll make of her sweet little husband getting dicked so hard he cries."

"Richie," Eddie says, his fingers clenched white on the door handle. "I need to get my flight."

"Stop fucking saying you need to get your flight."

Eddie stops talking, instantly. The thrill of it shoots through Richie, all the way from his sternum to his aching balls. 

"Give me your plane ticket."

"It's on my phone."

"Bullshit. No way would you not have printed out a copy too. Give it to me."

Eddie swallows and then he's scrambling inside his bag for the ticket. He hands it to Richie, who rips it up and throws the pieces out the window. 

"Richie," Eddie says, looking frantic. "I think there's something wrong with me. Ever since we got back yesterday, I can't think properly when I'm around you. When we're together all I can think about is how much I want you to touch me. It's not healthy-"

"Not healthy? I don't really give a shit about that."

"- and I think it would be better for both of us if we spent some time apart and-"

"And what? You run back home to your cunt wife and never talk to me again?"

Eddie's entire body is trembling now. But his eyes are dark, and his mouth has opened on a small pant. He's turned on. Richie knows because he has that same expression on his face from the night before. When his eyes glittered as he moved on Richie's cock.

"You don't even know what I'd be prepared to do," Richie says softly. "I'll come to your home in the middle of the night and I'll slit her throat."

Eddie bucks like he's just been shot. "Oh my god, Richie."

"Or I'll pay someone else to do it. I know people. Guys I met during community service. They'd do anything for cash."

"Richie-"

"I'll have her killed and then I'll fuck you on the bed, right where you slept next to her, and then I'll take you with me."

Eddie sucks in a breath, and he looks at Richie with an expression he's never seen before. Like Richie isn't even a man. Like he's a beast, something that's just stalked out of the woods and stolen him from his bedroom. But it's not fear on Eddie's face, and it's not horror.

"So you can come with me now or then. It's up to you."

Eddie bites down on his lip, the one swollen from Richie's kiss. "What will the others say? Bill and everyone."

"Eddie, have you been listening to a thing I've been saying? I don't care. All I want is you."

His eyes flicker down to Eddie's collar.

"Show me your bite again."

With shaky fingers, Eddie does, unbuttoning his first few buttons to push his shirt to the side.

And there it is: Richie's mark. His claim. He reaches out to press his fingers to it, revelling in Eddie's small whine.

"You're mine, Eddie," he says, letting every single thought he'd ever had about Eddie take hold. "You're fucking mine. I knew it the moment I snapped your arm into place in Neibolt. I knew it, you were mine then. And you're mine now. Look at me and tell me you understand that."

Eddie takes a second, but then he nods, eyes shining. "I understand."

"And you love me?"

"I do... I love you, Richie."

"Come here," Richie says, as he draws Eddie's chin in for a kiss.

It's soft, but it soon turns deep and wet. All tongue and desperation. Until Eddie's crawling into Richie's lap and straddling him. They make out like that, pressed so tightly against each other, all Richie can think about is their bodies fusing together. Of never being parted again.

Then, the clincher - Eddie leans back and says, "Please kiss it," and Richie knows exactly what he means.

As Eddie arches his head back, Richie kisses the bite, worrying it with his teeth until Eddie's gasping and then soothing it with his tongue.

By the time he's stopped, Eddie has gone boneless, his tight grip on Richie's shoulders the only thing keeping him up.

"Let's get out of here, okay?" Richie says, his hands under Eddie's shirt, stroking his soft skin.

Eddie nods. "Okay," he says, as he looks into Richie's eyes. "Where are we going to go?"

"It doesn't matter. I'll drive us as far as we can go while it's daylight."

And this time, it's Eddie who leans in for a kiss.

Later, a lot later, when Richie's driven them to a motel as far away as possible, when he's paid up for the week - ignoring the man at the front desk who stares at him and says, "Hey, don't I know you?" - and Eddie's lying in his arms, Richie thinks about the book of fairytales.

"Hey," he says, nosing at the back of Eddie's neck. They'd be dozing for most of the afternoon, and Eddie was a warm, soft pile in his arms.

"Hmmm?" Eddie hums sleepily into the pillow.

"What ever happened to that book of fairytales? The one Bill gave you when we were kids?"

Eddie makes another sleepy noise. He presses back against Richie, who tightens his arms around him. Their phones have been switched off and discarded at the bottom of one of Eddie's bags, so they could avoid all the missed calls from Myra and Richie's manager. Richie knew if he looked at his phone there would be a string of furious messages from Bill asking him where the hell he was, and what he's done with Eddie, but he can't bring himself to care. Not with the boy of his dreams dozing in a sleepy, content puddle next to him.

"Mom threw it away," Eddie says into his pillow.

Richie blinks against him. "What? Why?"

Eddie yawns. "She said it was pornography. She took it from my room and set it on fire one night."

Richie snorts - he can just picture Sonia Kaspbrak fretting over her son being corrupted by fairytales. "Your mom was a piece of work."

"I know, I was heartbroken."

"Hey, it's okay, I can buy you a new one."

Eddie shuffles, turns in Richie's arms. "It's okay, I don't need one."

"No? You loved that book though."

Eddie doesn't answer for a moment, instead leaning in for a small kiss, which Richie gladly gives.

"I don't need it to make wishes anymore, I have my prince right here," he murmurs against Richie's mouth.

Richie's chest clenches, his heart soft _._

He brushes the sweat-damp hair back from Eddie's forehead. In the dim light shining through the slatted blinds, his eyes unguarded, cheeks flushed, he looks impossibly young. Like the boy he knew that summer, before the clown had ever come into their lives.

"Oh yeah? I thought I was the monster?"

Eddie's face turns introspective. He draws a finger down Richie's lips, parts them to look at his teeth. "Maybe you can be both," he whispers. 

On the base of Eddie's throat, his claiming bite glows like a brand. It'll probably scar. Richie leans down to brush his lips over it, his mouth tingling at the way Eddie sucks in a breath, how his skin quivers when his mouth touches the mark. Richie has left marks all over Eddie's body since they got here, but the bite on his throat pops with colour, like a blood-red love heart drawn on his pale skin.

"Okay," Richie says. "I think I'm good with that."

Eddie smiles again. "My Adonis," he teases gently. 

In the hazy afternoon light, just for a second, Eddie's eyes shimmer gold.

**Author's Note:**

> In this fic, Pennywise curses Eddie to an enchanted sleep as a mocking punishment for his childhood love of the Sleeping Beauty fairytale and as a reflection of Richie's sexual fantasies about owning him. Like in the original version of Sleeping Beauty, Richie has sex with Eddie while he sleeps to break the spell, but also to claim his body and soul from Pennywise. 
> 
> There is a transference of power between Pennywise and Richie following this act, and it's suggested that a soul bond is forged between Richie and Eddie, which drives Eddie to seek out sex with him to nourish the fledgling bond.
> 
> As part of the Sleeping Beauty sequence, Eddie is sleeping the first time Richie has sex with him, so there's a lack of verbal consent. It's a short scene, but if that makes you uncomfortable, please don't read this fic.
> 
> If you'd like to chat about my writing or any of my fics, you can find me at shortcake-kaspbrak on Tumblr.


End file.
